I’ve been working on a new video art piece for some time which is a video spin-off of the sculpture/sound piece with the same name (to see that, check it out in the work section). I’ve done a few different shoots with different people (thanks Chajana and Tony), but the most recent version was closest in look and sound to what I was envisioning, but I may try to do more shoots of other types of relationships later on. See also Love Letters (Language is a Virus)
I’m still not sure if this is finished, since I thought about adding other visual elements, but the more I watch this, the more I like the total simplicity. So, please take a moment to look and if you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to send them to me.
I was inspired to make the piece by reading several emails, which disguised themselves as friendly personal letters (indicated by subject lines of “hello friend,” “how have you been?”, etc) and turned out to be spam emails advertising Viagra. The emails often contained long passages of text that seemed coherent at first, but then revealed that they were random internet facts strung together into paragraphs. I imagined these emails as love letters sent specifically to me and from there I thought about a fictional relationship in which the couple communicated exclusively in the language of spam. I thought that it spoke to both the idea of the lack of communication (talking without saying anything) as well as a secret system of communication that only a level of connection can bring.
The dialog is the actual text of a single spam email.