Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity is a col­lage. In fact, even the title is a col­lage: I took the title of Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and com­bined it with a ref­er­ence to the cul­ture of Inter­net file shar­ing. I have been inter­ested in col­lage and the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of mate­r­ial for some time, because as the say­ing goes, good artists bor­row but great artists steal. Col­lage is the most hon­est way to hon­our that prin­ci­ple, and I spent most of 2008 work­ing in this direction.

Col­lage, as well as related ideas such as sam­pling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few uni­fy­ing forces dri­ving artis­tic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMix­ter, these ideas have been respon­si­ble for renew­ing ama­teur art on a mass scale, for chal­leng­ing the stan­dards of cre­ativ­ity, for expand­ing musi­cal taste, and even for influ­enc­ing legal precedent.

For the first time in his­tory, we are drown­ing in art. There is too much music of the high­est artis­tic qual­ity for any­one to ever hope to expe­ri­ence. So how can artists con­tribute to cul­ture in a sit­u­a­tion like this? I think col­lage is an impor­tant part of the answer, and the proof is in the atti­tudes of those who grew up with the Inter­net. For many of them, art is not some­thing sim­ply to be expe­ri­enced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While com­pos­ing Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity, I gave myself some restric­tions in order to inspire cre­ativ­ity. For exam­ple, I decided to try to present all quo­ta­tions in as rec­og­niz­able a form as pos­si­ble. I did not allow myself to trans­pose frag­ments from their orig­i­nal tonal­i­ties, and I did not allow myself to com­pose my own new mate­r­ial to bridge together the quo­ta­tions—every note is bor­rowed. I also made tempo an inte­gral part of the musi­cal devel­op­ment, and I tried to make gram­mat­i­cal sense of all the text frag­ments I com­bined. Finally, every quote relates to the oth­ers in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obvi­ously) musi­cal sounds.

The texts for the five pieces in this set are taken from spam email mes­sages that I col­lected in 2006. I am attracted to the idea of using spam email texts because of what they rep­re­sent. Since the pur­pose of com­mer­cial spam is always to trick some­one into spend­ing money, these texts are always tar­geted at our most deep-seated fears and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. This makes them a pow­er­ful source of sub­ject matter.

Each of the five texts tries to exploit spe­cific vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, described below:

1. Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine — Phys­i­cal infir­mity, fail­ure of con­ven­tional treat­ments, lack of hope.
2. The Most Impor­tant Work of Your Career — Job dis­sat­is­fac­tion, appeals to authority.
3. One Hun­dred Seventy-Three Cen­time­tres, Fifty-Three Kilo­grams — Lone­li­ness, lack of social inter­ac­tion, lack of roman­tic opportunity.
4. Dear User. Why Don’t You… — Lack of self-confidence, prob­lems with body image, lust.
5. A Time of Resource — Greed, feel­ings of miss­ing out, peer pressure.