In our age of instantaneous digital communication, artist Miranda July seeks to reintroduce spontaneity into our daily interactions. In the dreaded parlance of the tech boom, she’s disrupting them. “I get a real high from accidental interactions with strangers,” she says. “It’s weird, it does somehow make me feel better.”
The writer (
It Chooses You) and actor/director (
Me and You and Everyone We Know) is back with a new genre-bending work that
blends audience participation, performance art, and tech into an app called Somebody. Funded by Miuccia Prada’s bold, youthful fashion line, Miu Miu, as part of its “Women’s Stories” series and built by Stinkdigital, Somebody debuted on Aug. 28 with an accompanying short film that explains its use: to send messages to your friends via strangers in a tech-savvy game of telephone.
“When you send your friend a message through Somebody, it goes — not to your friend — but to the Somebody user nearest your friend,” the app’s description explains. This stranger is then responsible for tracking down your friend and reading your message aloud. You can include performance cues for the stranger, like [SCREAM] or [FIST BUMP] or, if you think your friend is up for it, [KISS].
