This is part of a body of work that incorporates text from e-mail messages I have received from “virtual strangers,” that is, people I have met on-line and have never met in real-life. After initially corresponding with a number of people through a personals website, several wanted to have more personal and private conversations through e-mail with me over a period of weeks and even months. These private e-mail narratives are the basis for this work.

Talk Soon is a video projection and sound installation that uses a real e-mail conversation as the grounds for a fictional narrative. The 2-channel audio allows the male and female voices to pan the room spatially as the e-mail letters are exchanged. As the male and female voices talk across the room, their relationship is revealed through the narrative: they get to know one another, they begin to reveal both casual and intimate information, and finally they drift apart. The repetition of the video images allows the viewer to move back and forth between the audio and the image. The nature of the video highlights the promise of erotic experience and continuous flow offered by the internet while the audio narrative provides resistance to this fantasy.

Documentary material intersects with pure invention, problematizing the relationship between identity and artist, real life and fiction. Despite the distancing techniques, the work is emotional in tenor. This work questions whether distances can be bridged and the interfaces that technology produces can be punctured.