Our lives are increasingly lived online, including our relationships. Much of our communication is now typed rather than handwritten or spoken. Instead of immediately critiquing this new reality, I wanted to explore the complex and often surreal nature of digital, long distance, or writing-based relationships. “Letters” is an interactive art piece website that combines choose-your-own-adventure games and the surrealist exercise of echo poetry to express those very ideas. On the “Letters” website, users choose from different words to help the website “write” a poem. Their choices determine the resulting written and visual piece. In the end, “Letters” exemplifies the internet’s potential as a medium for creation, collaborative storytelling, and art while also pointing out its transformative and sometimes negative effect on relationships.

The “Letters” poem’s format draws from the surrealist movement, which started in 1917. Surrealists believed truth is found in dreams and the subconscious – in another, largely unexplored reality – and developed writing exercises to aid in discovering this sort of truth. One collaborative surrealist exercise is echo poetry. An echo poem is written by two people on a page divided into two columns. The first person writes a verse on the left-hand side of the page. The other person then writes an “echo,” a single word that often corresponds phonetically, on the right-hand side in response. Taken separately, the left-hand and right-hand columns each form their own individual poem – even the “echoes” are their own a cohesive thought. The two sides taken together create a powerful dialogue and their own full piece.

The format of an echo poem reminded me of online messaging or texting. We reach out to one another in this new digital layer of reality, where text replaces or alters speech, inflection, appearance, body language, environment, etc. On one hand, this elimination of context seems to limit the reality and effectiveness of our attempts at communication – we may only ever catch echoes of what the other person is trying to tell us, or echoes of the other person themselves. The longing for “real” connection, or physical presence, is tangible in our messages. On the other hand, this new reality reveals truths that we couldn’t access before and allows us to connect in unforeseen ways. And, of course, there are some relationships where an elimination of context is necessary to communicate. We ultimately build a new version of ourselves and our relationships with each message we send into the web. This piece tries to explore all of these ideas.

“Letters” was born from my personal experiences with long-distance, online relationships, both romantic and platonic. As a website, “Letters” is accessible outside of the museum exhibit, free of the art world context. It’s my hope that visitors will visit and share “Letters” again outside of the exhibit, continuing to play with its poem and relating it to their own digital relationships.