Culture

Emails are one of those everyday mundanities. They are part of our daily routine, used by nearly every one of us to varying degrees and for various purposes. There is one email, however, that is deserving of special mention: that which appears in my inbox every Monday from the multi-talented actress, artist and director, Miranda July.

As with most routine actions, we dedicate very little thought to email as a social experience, seeing it simply as a convenient form of communication. It is this oversight that July’s project aims to rectify. With a sort of post-modern (or “late-modern,” if you prefer) flourish, July’s self-referential, reflexive email-art project We Think Alone proposes a new way of looking at the emails in your inbox.

Personally, I find emails, and the strange intricacies of their implicit-yet-universally-understood discourse, bemusing. Each individual, however, uses email differently, and it is this individuality that We Think Alone explores. July’s interest lies in the intimacy that is somehow relayed through seemingly mundane email dialogue, and in the fact that in composing emails people subconsciously develop virtual versions of themselves. As July explains, “a quiet person might ‘!!!’ a lot,” and “a person with a busy mind might write almost nothing.”

Her work itself asked nine celebrities to share an intimate email from their sent-box every week between 1 July and 11 November. Each week had a specified theme, and subscribers received this themed compendium in their personal inboxes. Participants included the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (the NBA’s all-time leading scorer), filmmaker Lena Dunham (of HBO series Girls), actress Kirsten Dunst, Rodarte designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, and even physicist Lee Smolin.

Commissioned by Swedish art gallery Magasin 3 for the series On the Tip of My Tongue, July’s email-art formed part of a wider project aimed at directing attention away from the typical exhibition space, the gallery.

To date, July’s project has included themes such as “about money,” “a business email,” and, particularly enjoyable, “an email you decided not to send.” Her work has been criticised for its inclusion of famous individuals, for failing to meaningfully convey the dynamics of email relationships, and even for its supposed lack of insight into Kirsten Dunst’s psyche. In my opinion, however, the work is highly successful: not only is it great value as entertainment, it also offers an intriguing commentary on the evolving nature of email and technology more broadly.

Perhaps it is a bit of a voyeuristic experiment. Studying how people write to their mothers or knowing that artist Danh Vo once signed off an email with a bit of Spanish and a cute pet name (“besistos, baby monster”) seems to be bordering on the obsessive.

Yet unlike text messaging, for example, emails span the formal-informal divide when it comes to communication. People use different language depending on whether the email is for business or for pleasure. Emails are also a form of multimedia: as part of July’s project we see a number of photos of Dunham in costume (originally sent to her lover) and a photo in which writer Sheila Heti plays with the tunnel effect on her Mac’s “photobooth.” July has thus chosen a complex “medium” to investigate, and one with a lot to say about how we virtually construct our lives.

So far, the 12 weeks of July’s study have provided an interesting insight into people’s personalities and everyday relationships, and into the possibility that emails may constitute an artistic statement on the fundamental digitalism of our lives. It has also forced me to reconsider the way I write my own personal emails, and the way in which we interact with seemingly “ordinary” technology in this digital era. Last but not least, it’s a fun excuse to read other people’s mail.

You can sign up to receive the remaining emails of July’s project at www.wethinkalone.com (or something like that)