Learning to Love You More, Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher (2002-2009) [art]
A crowdsourced art project based on cute prompts
It’s hard to place yourself back on the internet of 2002. Social media was still a twinkle in our eyes (Facebook was founded in 2004), but for Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher this was they year set out to build an online community over the next near-decade (despite being "skeptical of the web for an art project” and lamenting “spending too much time online”). The project entailed offering daily “assignments” to followers and then publishing responses. In the end, they had about 8,000 participants, many of whom sent physical artifacts to Miranda, Harrell, and Yuri (their third collaborator) because uploading wasn’t yet a thing.
Some of my favorite assignments include:
Draw a constellation from someone's freckles (how intimate!)
Take a picture of your parents kissing (how heartwarming!)
Spend time with a dying person (how life-changing!)
Recreate the moment after a crime (how devious!)
Repair something (how industrious!)
Say goodbye (oof!)
Here’s a link to the online community with all of the prompts (images from it below). The project also ended up as a physical exhibition (at SFMOMA, The Whitney, Seattle Art Museum, and more) as well as a book.
Some images of the artifacts:
Assignment: take a picture of your parents kissing
Assignment: make an encouraging banner
Assignment: draw a scene from a movie that made you cry
More to buzz about:
Miranda and Harrell talking about the project
Miranda and Harrell were a couple when the project started, but split at some point during it. Makes the “say goodbye” prompt carry some extra weight.
There were only 569 million people worldwide connected to the Internet in 2002 (9% of the global population). Today, 18 years later that number is 4.54 billion (60% of the global population).
A long list of crowdsourced projects