Mickey Lukens, a senior majoring in Culture and Media, is using Twitter to revive the events of September 11th, 2001.
After conducting research through online news publications, he learned the exact times at which major events during the attacks and their aftermaths took place. On the account, named Angelus Novus (@NovusAngelus), and created solely for this project, Lukens posted updates throughout the day as if the attacks were in progress.
Lukens’ main intention behind the project was to encourage people to consider the impact of the attacks in a more modern context, and also to reflect on how the nation’s mindset has changed since that day. “It’s important to ask the question of how a country deals with an event like this as time goes by,” he said.
On a more basic level, Lukens is interested in how people will react to the translation of this event into social media. “At one point, I just realized that I had to do this,” he said. “And I knew that if I was going to do it, I had to go all-out.”
The name of the page was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s analysis of a painting by Paul Klee, pictured below. Benjamin described the figure as “an angel with its wings up, looking at a tragic event, moving backwards and into the present simultaneously.” Because Lukens is interested in exploring the intellectual impact of this tragic event, he felt that this painting aligned with his image of the project.
The posts themselves are meant to serve more as a timeline for the reader than as mock news updates, and they go beyond merely recounting the attacks themselves. Alerts to developments like “Bush departing from Florida” help provide a sense of the day’s progression.
“It’s more about getting people to experience the day again,” said Lukens. He hoped that followers reading his updates would think about what they were doing at that very moment in 2001.
Currently, the Lukens has posted fifty one times and has three followers. Because he thought of the concept for the project only a week before today, he’s had difficulty developing publicity for it. Still, he hopes to keep the posts he’s made today throughout the year, attract more attention, and continue with it into the future.
Dilara O’Neil, a sophomore studying Journalism, was living in Greece at the time of the attacks. Still, she remembers her mother receiving a frantic call from her father as she was leaving swim practice, where he told her what had happened. “It didn’t really hit me until later that night,” she said.
Despite her initially distanced reaction, O’Neil feels that people are beginning to lose sense of the weight of the tragedy. “I think the account is a good reminder,” she said.