From January 4th, 1966 through the end of his life in 2014, the Conceptual artist On Kawara created a series of paintings that, taken together, constitute his "Today Series." Following his own rigorous set of instructions, every day, he set out to paint a canvas in liquitex with the date in white, at the center, using the language and grammar conventions of his current location. If a canvas was not complete by the day's end, he destroyed it. Finished paintings were each stored in a custom wooden box with a newspaper clipping. If a painting was not on exhibition, it remained in its box.

As commentary on his rule set and the inevitability of human error, I automated Kawara's "Today Series" as a Twitter bot. Every 24 hours, the account @today_series tweets an HTML5 Canvas image of a rectangle in a randomly-selected shade blue, red, or black* with the day's date, centered in white Futura font. Whereas Kawara's paintings were contingent on the artist's location, the code for my "paintings"—a Node.js app—lives on an Amazon EC2 server configured for the West Coast. Language and time are pre-determined, immutable. In order to run the app permanently and without my intervention, I used the Node module Forever. Never before has a service daemon seemed so poetic.

*An approximation of Kawara's palette.