Affective Communication in Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) This is Rhizome Today for Friday, October 10, 2014 Rhizome Today is an experiment in ephemeral blogging: a series of posts that are written hastily in response to current events, and taken offline within a day or so. The latest post can always be found at rhizome.org/today. Somebody It's always a bit distorting when the reception of an artist or work overshadows their/its practice—and this is frequently the case when an artist works across media (confusing rote categorization) or addresses broad audiences (generating suspicion around their artistic credibility). Miranda July's work—in film and video and performance and sculpture and design, and now, with her newest work Somebody, apps—has from time to time suffered this fate. Co-presented by Rhizome and the New Museum as part of our First Look online/offline exhibition series, along with a consortium of arts institutions and the funder Prada, Somebody is an iOS-based communications service which transmits messages via the user nearest to the receiver (generally a stranger) who is then charged by the sender with performing the note for the receiver. Last night, the Los Angeles-based July came to the New Museum to discuss Somebody, and contextualize the app within her practice—here the museum, as it often does, serving work so well by offering a forum for an artist to make sense of its existence within an oeuvre. And this was a particularly lucid and compelling artist talk. I think more than being misunderstood, Somebody has not been thought through, so I wanted to share three points about it that July's talk made me realize: Ephemerality is a Gateway Somebody is a twin to an app like Snapchat, which uses the promise of deletion to alter the creation and reception of a message. Somebody does this by placing the message within, ideally, a stranger who will go about their business once the message is delivered, obliterating it through apathy. The artist has often used the character of the stranger in this role (in plays generated by audience participation, for instance) mining the very difficulty of making a connection to produce estranged contexts for meaning-making. In this case, July, in her talk, spoke about the app as a tool to transition attention and living away from the iPhone. I would add that the reason why life feels like it exists on the screen is partly because of the instantly available archives it offers, of what seems like everything. Break the archive, break the tether, relearn embodied memory. Affective Communication is the Future When July was asked what she would like to see more of in the app she said, "better writing" particularly with regard to describing the affect in a given communication. When a message is sent via Somebody, the composer is meant not only to transcribe the communication, but also to describe how it is to be performed. (i.e. "Jeremy, I miss you" [crying and holding hands].) In the context of screen-oriented living, communication does not end with words, but can expand to images, emoji, methods not yet seen or understood. (This is a horizon about which I had a great conversation recently with L.A.-based artist R. Lord, whose newest work has been taking up hieroglyphs as communication.) Via the talk, I came to appreciate how July's work often relies on individuals producing affect, and then interpreting and trying to make meaning of it. In particular, I saw a line between Somebody and the film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which portrays a very memorable moment of passion mediated by and relying on vivid, imaginative textual description (in 2005 no less!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa-PP12lkEE Affective Labor is a Medium Somebody's central assumption is that strangers will pick up their phones, see their calls to action, and then perform their roles in dramas/comedies of which they have no part. In this way, it plays on a now broadly assumed capacity and willingness to perform for others. That is, it heightens and makes transparent the way in which contexts like social media have radically expanded our set of tools for living. Twitter and Facebook train us how to act, that is. And this is difficult! Somebody both makes plain this shift and uses it as a tool—its labor still uncompensated, of course (Nationalize Facebook!), but it is labor appreciated and validated. In the end, July's work is public not only in the (broadly commented upon) sense that it engages "everyday people," but in that it seeks to be communicative and richly discursive about the issues of the day—Somebody is sophisticated and challenging and relevant and very fun to talk about. Anyway, give the app a try or, if not, a deep think. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/aug/28/first-look-miranda-july/ http://somebodyapp.com/ Somebody can work anywhere, but it works best in proximity to other users. Official hotspots include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Walker Art Center, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Museo Jumex, and the New Museum.
