Current Projects: All My Friends on Facebook

From the Foreword

Contrary to Facebook, I do not have more than a hundred friends as listed on my profile. Instead, this number signifies the amount of people I’ve met, found interesting, and considered maintaining a relationship with, even if only virtually. All My Friends on Facebook is a report of first and developing, old and new impressions of everyone I know according to Facebook. Each report incorporates varying degrees of autobiography, conjecture, and objective documentation. The result is a precarious myriad of varying degrees of ‘friendships,’ that contrary to Facebook, is based on discriminatory content rather than phatic communication. The purpose of the former is to interrogate the latter, to evade the saturation of passive interactions, and to provide, if possible, a discourse based on personal affection, rather than social connection.

This has proven to be an extremely challenging task, since sentiments vary and memory fades. While writing this project, the question of how one should portray real people, let alone friends, is daunting, because every aesthetic choice reveals some form of judgment. I do not have a solution for this dilemma. Rather, what I do have is a collection of attempts, in which the subjective voice is suppressed, memories are invented, or the issue is not considered a problem at all. Hence, the zine is less a ‘report’ proper, but rather a process of writing and transforming real people into literary beings and simultaneously documented subjects. The tensions that occur are barely handled gracefully. It is not my intent to provide truth or entertainment; all I have to offer is the extent of what I know about everyone I know.

Note: this zine is a preview and contains only a selected number of facebook friends.