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theohonohan · 6 months ago

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Incognito: A partial review of Miranda July’s All Fours

In the words of Miranda July, “There always have to be some living things that are unsatisfied, itchy, trying too hard.” She is one of them. In her novel All Fours, the main character (who resembles July) decides she needs a change of scenery and sets out to drive from Los Angeles to New York. She doesn’t get very far, spontaneously exiting the freeway in Monrovia (a town in Greater Los Angeles, essentially part of the city) and checking in to a motel. It’s not much of a change of scenery, topographically speaking, but she’s a stranger there (or so she thinks).

I am pursuing a very specific interest in relation to July’s work: I really like the concept of the app she created in 2014, called Somebody, and I want to understand where the idea came from. Somebody was a working implementation of a messaging service with a difference: instead of appearing on the screen of your smartphone, your text message would be delivered by a passing volunteer, who would perform your words to the recipient, including any stage directions.

"Somebody is very related to other work I've done that elicits performance from the public and art making," says Miranda July when I reached her by phone. "I am making a script for other people to say ideally in ways that include some of their own voice and story, and provide context and impetus of that.” https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/miranda-july-looking-for-somebody

When you send your friend a message through Somebody, it goes — not to your friend — but to the Somebody user nearest your friend. This person (probably a stranger) delivers the message verbally, acting as your stand-in. The app launched at the Venice Film Festival along with a short companion film, part of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series. Since Somebody is brand new early adapters are integral to its creation — the most high-tech part of the app is not in the phone, it’s in the users who dare to deliver a message to stranger. “I see this as far-reaching public art project, inciting performance and conversation about the value of inefficiency and risk,” says July. […] Half-app / half-human, Somebody twists our love of avatars and outsourcing — every relationship becomes a three-way. The antithesis of the utilitarian efficiency that tech promises, here, finally, is an app that makes us nervous, giddy, and alert to the people around us. “When you can’t be there…Somebody can.”

Details: • Add actions and directions for your stand-in, such as [crying] or [hug] — or write your own. • The recipient always has the option of declining a delivery before it’s set in to motion, if now’s not a good time. • The first sentence of the message is automatically “[Recipient’s name]? It’s me, [Sender’s Name]” — reminding the stand-in to assume the identity of the sender. • Somebody™ uses GPS to locate your friend and users nearby, then presents you with photos and performance ratings so you can choose the best possible delivery person for your message. If there’s no one nearby, you can choose to “float” your message indefinitely. Users interested in being a stand-in can browse nearby floating messages and pick one to deliver. https://mirandajuly.com/somebody-app/

To get straight to the point: by delivering the message via a physically present human intermediary, the app thematises the gap between performed emotion and felt emotion, between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. The technical, locative aspects (indeed, all of the trappings of appness) are ancillary to the risky, embodied act of becoming a stand-in for another person.

My initial interest in the app derived from the fact that it created a pretext to interact with strangers, and that it introduced a serendipitous element into the usually seamless end-to-end experience of digital messaging.

I guess, as others have noted, that “the search for connection is a fundamental aspect of [July’s] work”. The app (which I never used) wasn’t technically polished, to July’s discomfort (she is a perfectionist): https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/apps-a-bust-but-it-doesnt-dampen-spirits-at-miranda-july-event/

The Tumblr account which accompanied the app contains a video of Miranda July delivering a Somebody message to Lena Dunham. It’s a complex message, sent by Dunham to herself, and it attributes certain emotions to July. As she delivers it, July feels the need to state when her emotions are in agreement with the stage directions and when she is merely attempting to follow them as part of her performance. The app comes across as a tool for facilitating social “extreme sports” among people who might, or might not, be “in their feelings”, but who are prepared to take emotional risks.

I’m more interested now, though, in other ways in which the concept behind Somebody reflects the artist’s way of being in the world.

A New York Magazine article on July reports that

Much of her childhood was spent listening to the rants of “borderline crazy writers,” along with disturbing seventies-style confessions from both parents about their personal and marital challenges. “I wasn’t neglected at all, but my parents didn’t have the best boundaries in the world,” says July, who dropped out of college at 20 and fled to Oregon. “I was privy to pretty much everything about their lives.” She pauses. “I think that’s definitely where my desire to be the one who understands comes from.” https://nymag.com/movies/features/31801/

Similarly, in the novel, July’s narrator writes “I always go out of my way to not be like my mom in these situations. She often felt she was being mocked—so she mocked back. She’d get nervous and mock a waitress, a cab driver, a neighbor. Sometimes they didn’t notice, but often they did and a fight would break out, ending with her in tears.”

On dancing on Instagram, July says, “For someone who walks around feeling like a brain with two periscope eyes, being able to get up from working and suddenly feel things in ways that actually bypass my intellect [is important]”. https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/may/12/i-was-in-a-kind-of-ecstatic-freefall-artist-miranda-july-on-writing-the-book-that-could-change-your-life

So, July seems to be an intellectualiser who spends a lot of time in her own head. Perhaps the role of being a stand-in in the Somebody app is inspired by her own persona, and ideally suited for a person who uses cognition, rather than emotion, to navigate the social world. Maybe that’s the essential character of the app. It’s intimacy at a remove. In All Fours, the narrator remarks “I’m so alert to intimacy; at a glance I can immediately tell what a person’s capacity for it is.” Being able to gauge someone’s capacity for intimacy isn’t the same thing as readily experiencing intimacy.

In the novel, July’s protagonist leaves her familiar social world and moves into a world where she is a stranger. In the process of deciding to stop in Monrovia, she observes “Of course no one out here would recognize me; it was kind of liberating to know that I’d be totally anonymous, neutral, for the next 2,700 miles.” A few pages later, she gets back onto the freeway: “I drove unnecessarily fast, merging across all four lanes. I was driving in the wrong direction, back toward L.A., but that didn’t seem like too big a deal. A lot of other cars were headed this way, it’s not like I was the only one. I exited in Monrovia. I drove past Fontana’s and parked in front of a smoothie shop.“

This moment of compulsive driving evokes Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. Everyone knows that Los Angeles consists of locations separated by more-or-less homogenous freeway journeys. One uses the non-place of the freeway to go to the real places that exist at the end of every off-ramp.

As Eve Babitz wrote:

Last week I woke up at 8 a.m. thinking about taquitos. I knew that the place on the corner doesn't open until 11, which meant that I would be at time's mercy at least until 10:30 when I could get in my car and take a leisurely drive down Sunset. Most people would take the freeway, but that's a little too coldhearted. I mean, taking the freeway when you're on your way to get a taquito for 45 cents is like taking a jet to go visit your cat, the texture's wrong. … The convenient freeway. It’s for you if you don’t want to know about anything, you just want to get there.

The other LA, the local, diverse, kaleidoscopic Los Angeles, is only to be found at ground level. What happens next in the novel is that the protagonist immerses herself in Monrovia as if she were a native. She dives into “knowing” about the place; experiencing her new locality’s particular but generic offerings:

I walked around. I browsed a pet supply store and an antique mall. I touched a celluloid doll’s leg and a beautiful pink silk bedspread. I got a manicure. I walked back to my car and then walked past it as if it were someone else’s car and I lived here. I sat in the library. I walked around the arboretum. I ate dinner at a restaurant called Sesame Grill. The waiter said something about last year’s parade; he thought I was a local and I didn’t correct him.

The influence of the automobile on the texture of life in Los Angeles is a well established topic. I think there’s another aspect to July’s narrative, though, which derives from the experience of browsing the Web. For her to go incognito in Monrovia is like opening a “private browsing” tab. The concept is that one will not be recognized, and that when one closes the tab, everything that happened within it will disappear, like a dream, becoming just a memory in the user’s mind. In the case of July’s story, she’s due back from her trip in three weeks, so her stay in Monrovia is bounded in time as well as space.

The discrete units into which the city is divided (the sub-city of Monrovia; the rooms in the motel) are not so dissimilar from the discrete elements of a computer interface. July’s precise way of dealing with life is apparently structured by categories:

Dave Eggers: As someone who works in different media, when you see or hear something you think you might work into an artwork of some kind, do you automatically know which medium it’s destined for? July: Usually I do. I write down the idea in my notebook, and then I put a little letter in the corner of the page in a circle. S for story, N for novel, M for movie, A for art, P for performance, B for business. This makes me sound totally rigid. I am also lots of fun! Totally wild! Party! https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/miranda-july

It starts to make sense that she would want to make an app, despite having no declared interest in technology.

In the novel, the protagonist recklessly decides to have her tawdry motel room redecorated, at great expense. It’s an absurd kind of privatization of a bedroom. It feels senseless and wasteful, an investment in a room she will have to give up in just a couple of weeks. Like a private browsing window, the motel room appears to the character as a blank slate, inviting action unconstrained by one’s past.

At a certain point, July’s character is recognised in Monrovia, and the setup changes. What was a temporary, private, dream becomes a shared experience, linked to her regular life. The trope of the shared dream is one that July has referred to in relation to her moviemaking: “I want to make a world and I want to get to dream the same dream as someone.” https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/miranda-july-kajillionaire

Indeed, her protagonist’s version of the “zipless fuck” seems to be to encounter a potential lover who already knows her—who is a fan, in fact. Effortless connection. I have to say that at that point (Chapter 8) I lost interest and put the book down. I’ll go back to it in a few days.

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