You I Everything Else
The chronicle of a correspondence, articulating post-digital romance as an ecstasy of communication
by Linn Phyllis Seeger
Images by Linn Phyllis Seeger
You I Everything Else was published by Skinnerboox in November 2020. All images in the book of Linn Phyllis Seeger are screenshots taken in the course of a relationship, interweaving fragments from private chats, social media, and digital interfaces. The book tells about long-distance romance in the digital age. Through screenshots, the viewer is allowed to take a glimpse under the surface of the artist’s phone; a private insight that is usually strictly password-protected and hidden behind a locked screen. The content that is revealed is strikingly relatable: scraps of text messages, search engines, maps, video stills, and emojis portray the visual chaos of modern-day correspondence. However, the imagery is fragmented, stretched, and enlarged until perfectly pixelated, as if trying to get close to something but ultimately failing. In this work, a real-life romantic encounter was transformed into a digital experience that was captured and again materialized into the physicality of a book. The constant metamorphosis and shapeshifting of this experience is part of the whole process of understanding.
