Messages: 2011-2017 (all these years of texting and we haven’t gotten any closer) is a multimedia installation, in which Luke Cheng and I present a multi-volume set of books containing the entirety of our shared Facebook chat history, along with an installation of its textual and photographic contents in a single-bedroom New York apartment, home of Isometric Studio.
Looking back at a conversational record spanning seven years, the exhibition reflects on the dislocated third space we created for ourselves out of digital points of rendezvous and makeshift instances of home. We explore the immateriality of intimacy by making the substance of our connection as tangible as possible—embodied in the form of an epistolary novel and unraveled into a physical domestic space. In an act of self-disclosure touching upon issues of gender and sexuality, we question how our experience of memory is changed by the omniscient digital platforms bearing witness to our lives and ask if something tender can grow in the interstitial world of bits and bytes.
Photo Credit: Luke Cheng