Note to self...

I love seeing the notes people write to themselves. Anything is interesting - grocery lists, notes from phone conversations, etc. But best of all are notes for creative projects. Strangely, diaries do not interest me - people seem so self-conscious when writing about themselves, and it ruins the kind of honesty and weird specificity that comes out when people need to communicate to themselves in the heat of the moment.

I have somewhere a huge number of text files that I downloaded from people's computers without them knowing. No - it was nobody that I know... This process was all very legal, but ethically not OK, in an I don't care kind of way - those foolish people left their private documents in their public "shared" folder when they were trying to download pirated mp3s, so they're suckers. Mostly I just searched for the words "Hello" or "Dear" or "letter."

Mostly this process was just exhausting and boring. 99% of the stuff I downloaded was just depressing generic lifeless rottenbrain bullshit - who are these androids that have infiltrated our society?

I read and recorded some of the ones that I really like:


(Note that the image in this video is just filler.)

There is something about reading other people's writing when you're not supposed to be doing so, but when it's inconsequential, irrelevant, everyday stuff. It's very different from learning a secret from someone - information that has meaning and value to you. It's more like reading a novel - the hyper-real resembles fiction.

Also, reading this made me feel like I was quickly jumping from inhabiting one replaceable hyper-real identity to another to another. A voice inside my voice imitating my voice, a spirit possession, an electronically stolen moment, an endless series of replaceable selves that make me feel replaceable myself, which is one of my favorite feelings.

I guess this is hard to convey with just the short sample above. I like LOOOOOOOOOOONG things. Things that are so long that you can walk in and out. It's all the same.

In my art practice I really haven't finished investigating this idea - part of all these projects where I ask people to interpret things for me is this process of sifting through piles of copy to uncover the secret stowaway gifts inside of the given gifts, the obscure pearls of the unconscious, the true spirit obscured by oodles of noodles.