Hotmail for desperate living

Ecrivez_write @ hotmail.com is the name of my project for PLANET 22, a conceptual gallery in Geneva. It is just what it is, an e-mail address that now anxiously waits for mail.

 

The work consists of an illuminated panel, affixed to a gallery project wall in Geneva’s red light district. Upon the panel, the address “Ecrivez_write @ hotmail.com” is written in white, surrounded by a pool of magenta. The sign glows silently, inviting passersby to respond in either

French or English.

 

E-mail addresses are private when on name cards or scribbled on tiny sheets of paper meant only for private exchanges. E-mail addresses are public when written on products, on advertising surfaces and flashing up on TV screens. When created by an individual, they can be used to express practicality, fantasy, individuality, invention and even desire and provocation. For example, Rainerganahl @ yahoo.com or fuckyou@bolt.com. Nothing needs to be true. Network identities are usually initiated with e-mail addresses and they're supposed to be invented, to be staged for our communicational arenas.

 

Ecrivez_write @hotmail.com is a publicly located address, an open invitation to anyone who encounters it so long as they are familiar with e-mail and technically literate. E-mail however, suggests a private dialog. The questions are: will people take notice of it, and will they write to me? Will I start e-relationships? And how will this work affect with my private affaires?

 

I myself am an e-mail enthusiast since 1989. In many ways e-mail has changed my life: the way I organize my activities, the way I communicate, the way I even think and day-dream. I barely need anything anymore. Today, e-mail messages are retrievable from nearly anywhere and at any time using all kinds of convenient, portable devices. Quasi-public interfaces such as Hotmail or Yahoo have the ability to liberate us from our own machines and even from our personal belongings. Liberation however, comes at a price.

 

Online providers go to great lengths to promise their customers discretion and privacy while using their services. A false sense of safety and anonymity is created, as people freely play with real and electronic identities. The reality however is different. Marketing companies, law enforcement agencies, and others, have relatively easy access to your personal information, enabling them to track your every move, both on and off the Internet. Cookies for example, using HTML data file packets such as CGI scripts, are regularly placed within your hard drive by remote web servers controlled by information hungry companies. Cookies uniquely identify you during web interactions, creating records of who you are, and what actions you take on a website. Such records can be easily passed on to anonymous third-party companies, creating opportunities for abuses of privacy.

 

There is much more to be said about the private and public uses of e-mail and its technical, social and psychological infrastructure. I however, prefer to simply wait here for your mail.

 

In the end, what e-mail creates are states of perpetual expectation. Endless streams of waiting and waiting and an inbox full of spam.

 

Ecrivez-write me at Ecrivez_write @ hotmail.com!

 

Geneva, May 2000

 

One year into this socio-poetic experiment, I have received 192 messages from 10 different people, with my having sent 167. Not surprisingly, most of the respondents have been artists who initially heard of the project through art world channels. The majority of messages received at Ecrivez_write @ hotmail.com have been written by three different respondents, yet there have been about 300 more exchanges using my personal account, since real friendships have grown out of the work.

 

Getting to know people in this way has been an exciting and liberating experience. Relationships were established through e-mail texts alone, fueled by the distance between myself in New York and my e-pals in Switzerland. At one point, I expressed my love for chocolate and consequently received presents and books via airmail. The e-mails eventually transformed into post cards, telephone conversations, and on two occasions lead to personal encounters.

 

Experiences such as these are unique and unpredictable. They fit well with a psychology of curiosity, adventure and desire, in a state of fracture, rupture and social isolation. They  simultaneously produce pleasure and frustration, since reality is harder to deal with then instant communication in a room of unrestricted and quasi-uncensored expressions. Through these meetings, writing becomes an art of encounter and community.

 

The city is falling on its stomach. This new situationist logic doesn’t need to remember street names. Nadja, the mysterious flaneur in Breton’s Paris of the early XX century can now get lost anywhere. An e-mail address and even only sporadic computer access is sufficient. Anybody could appear on our screens. Loss and fragmentation still occur but aren’t anymore only geographically defined. Combined with Boeing, Airbus and high speed train systems, the city and its multiple promises can be spread and carried around everywhere. Fog, urban darkness, danger and seduction exist now also through grammar and the use of words and idioms. Strange attractions may be sent with  electro-chemical idiosyncrasies. The beauty of late nights and of early mornings ends and begins with a password and some dial-up noise. E-dependencies go unnoticed and jet-leg becomes immanent when moving via the World Wide Web. Sleep and insomnia oscillate when we hit keyboards, scroll screens, and encounter friendly interfaces. Language is left behind as we continue clicking (incoming and outgoing) towards a time-zone-free horizon. I wish I were here; Wish you were here.

 

Etc. Etc. some subject (a selection): Eyes wide shut, Aug 27 2000, 2k; Re:

sad sans le e., Aug 27 2000,1k; aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa(

ueberuebelsensibel)rrr..., Aug 11 2000, 3k; very nice to hear from you....,

Jul 29 2000, 1k; writing immunity; Jul 25 2000, 2k; cadeau, Jul 24 2000,

1k; creating immunities, Jul 23 2000, 1k; My very first hours...., Jul 23

2000, 1k; Re: I am a nice person, Jul 22 2000, 2k; Alles blau in blau sehen

(Suite) (Suite)(Suit..., Jul 20 2000, 3k; Re: Schreiben Sie_ Moi, Jul 20

2000, 2k; Re: Le monstre du lac LEMON . Un épisode inéd...; Jul 18 2000,

1k; Re: lie or write, Jul 17 2000, 1k; (none), Jul 12 2000, 1k; Re: money

money money... a song; Jul 6 2000, 2k; Re: a song, Jul 6 2000, 2k; write and

buy, Jun 28 2000, 1k; steel and write, Jun 27 2000, 1k; Re: specified: : :

very specified; Jun 26 2000, 3k; Re: No subject was specified. Yes "no

subject..., Jun 19 2000, 2k; Blauer Fleckunempfindlich, Jun 18 2000, 1k;

écrit, Jun 18 2000, 1k; scrivere, Jun 17 2000,1k; geschriebt, Jun 16 2000,

1k; alles superpflanzen, Jun 16 2000, 1k; writerobert, Jun 12 2000, 1k;

ecrirons; Jun 11 2000, 1k; what a suspense, Jun 2 2000, 1k; Re: qu'est-ce

que j'écris?, Jun 5 2000, 2k; qu'est-ce que j'écris? May 31 2000, 1k.

 

Scattered messages by people spread all over the world, including from the ones that are living next door or in the same room, intensify the pulse of things. This art of literate and literal encounters usually has something utopian and liberating about it, and is more like poetic  lubrication than power.

 

New York, May 22, 2001

 

Again, a year and a half have passed. The generosity that has characterized the early internet industry has almost evaporated together with many internet firms that have powered it. The e-economy is as bad as the current performance of the stock market and the economy in general world wide. In the USA, 9/11, terrorism, reactionary and repressive state politics, war propaganda, corporate scandals, a sacking economy and the failing of free market ideologies have created an impressive paradigm shift for everything and everybody. Interesting enough, e-mail accounts by hotmail, yahoo and others global email-providers have played a big role for terrorist networks. People and governments are now more concerned with security, paranoia, protectionism and war than with free wheeling semi-promiscuous communication and exchange. The first effect of this new climate I felt when I didn’t check my account on hotmail and it was shut down, deleted. Now, they want money or constant consultation. But apart from that, I didn’t miss it. Nobody was writing to me anymore. The big corporation swallowed it without any signs of appetite or fatigue. I wasn’t able to retrieve anything.

 

Meanwhile I repeated this experiment in Italy with an account entitled: scrivimiwriteme @hotmail.com. There I found a true friend who I actually met before writing started and who keeps writing to me regularly. So there is no danger of missing the once a month check-in requirement. Concerning my personal life, urban romanticism, electro-narcissism and social aleatoric have subsided a new seriousness that doesn’t include anymore starvation for new social contacts and random love. My e-mail existence has shrunk to pure practicality with little unpredictability. I don’t expect my daily moods to be corrected by incoming message as much as I once did. I use my different accounts with little strange attraction and erotic excitement. Geneva also hasn’t been on my agenda except for a small talk at the local art school. For the reason of this publication I just opened again the same account: ecrivez_write @ hotmail.com. I’m curious if somebody will take use this offer and start a dialog. Concerning my part of the equation, my electronic longing is due to my current living situation reduced to quasi zero. There definitely seems to be a direct relationship between desperate living and hotmail. But as life is always shifting and changing this state of my current happy-unhappy stasis might also fall again and e-mail soon might be one of my emotional and existential exit roads again. Desperate we are, desperate we write, hotmail or not hotmail.

 Rainer Ganahl, www.ganahl.info, October, New York 2002

PS: November 02: I just was invited for a micro-installation in a public park in Vienna for a work that asks passer bys "to do something" in a couple of a seconds: my proposal for that is simply the German request to write to me expressed already through an email-address.:

bitte_schreibe_mir @ hotmail.com. this is of course a very public indication, and I am curious about its results. A part from the people walking by through, this place is also populated by local drug dealers and consumers. I am not sure whether they are into this kind of linguisticexchange.