"I'm always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they've sent to other people - to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent - the more mundane the better," explains July. "How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene - a glimpse of them from their own point of view."
July was originally going to ask her closest friends to contribute. "But then I thought that wouldn't be interesting to anyone except me," she says. "I realised that people needed to feel like they were friends with the emailers too. It seemed like a good use of famous people."
Along with Dunham, every girl's fantasy best friend, who says that the project is "one of the coolest things I've ever been involved with", July asked fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, the basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Sheila Heti, writer of How Should a Person Be? to contribute. The Israeli writer Etgar Keret, photographer Catherine Opie, Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist, and artist Danh Vo make up the group.
It is a deliberately mixed bag. "I needed someone who would deliver, and knew that Lena Dunham would be totally uninhibited," says July. "Then I chose Kirsten Dunst as an actress whose power comes from you not really knowing who she is." Fellow writer Heti is a friend, who in turn suggested her neighbour Smolin - "I needed someone who wasn't an artist. Someone whose head works differently..." Abdul-Jabbar, the highest scorer in NBA history, came on board when July found, to her surprise, that he had written a blog praising her as "the voice of a generation". "I know no one in sport. But I knew he was a fan of mine." Did anyone say no? "No one."
July is best known for her films Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future but has form with collaborative art. In 1996 she created Joanie4Jackie, "an all-girl video chain letter" to share short films made by women. Then, in 2002, she founded the online project Learning to Love You More, for which she and artist Harrell Fletcher set regular assignments for artists - Repair something; Climb to the top of a tree and take a picture of the view; Document your bald spot, etc. It ran for seven years, 8,000 people took part and the work is now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's collection.
For July, who has her hands full with a new novel and a new baby, email proved a convenient medium for her latest artwork. Having found her correspondents, she compiled a list of subjects and simply waited for her inbox to ping. The replies ranged from the mundane to the outrageous, the administrative to the intimate. "I felt different kinds of discomfort reading them. I'd feel evil, then moved. When I first read Catherine Opie's, I was just screaming at my desk. They were unbelievable," says July. "And I was kind of surprised with Lena Dunham by how many are to her boyfriend. I assume Jack [Antonoff] knows she's doing this. And that he's cool with it."
Future mail-outs will include Dunham dispensing righteous relationship advice to a friend, Heti pondering whether to buy a new dress, the Rodarte sisters drawing up a detailed list of props for a shoot and Opie giving her niece or nephew some tough love about his/her high-school grades.
The thrill for subscribers is the chance to spy on the real lives of brilliant people. "But is it real, or is it a total illusion?" asks July. The project also raises questions about the method of communication which rules modern life and the 21st-century tendency to overshare online. Does our email style reflect our personality? Does using all caps on screen equal a VERY SHOUTY person in the flesh? Or are these emails a construct, a self- portrait in tersely tapped-out words, chosen to create an impression? Why is Dunham choosing to share that she has decided against buying a $24,000 bespoke Swedish sofa? Does it show us that (a) She has good taste (b) She is successful (c) She hasn't let her newfound wealth go to her head, or (d) All of the above? Do we glean anything more from a sweet snapshot of Dunst's feet and those of her mother in matching ballet shoes, than an illusion of intimacy with a superstar?
"It's very odd to see the way they construct themselves," says July. "It was quite sweet, really. More human and less crass than I expected. I worried that they would expose themselves too much, but in fact, everyone knows how to protect themselves. I became interested in the artful ways people came up with of protecting their privacy."
The first batch arrives in the wake of revelations about America's controversial surveillance programme, Prism. The timing is coincidental, says July, but the idea grew out of growing discomfort about the Byzantine privacy settings of social-networking sites. "Privacy, the art of it, is evolving," says July. "Does privacy even exist right now?" Not when it comes to We Think Alone, for which the original correspondence is reprinted in full, with only the email addresses and occasionally addressees redacted. "It has been quite a legal headache, to be honest," admits July.
Subscribers - 31,000 so far - will not be able to reply and there are no plans for a book. "I like that you can't buy it. That it's ephemeral." And there are, notably, no emails from July herself. "It seemed cleaner to just be the curator," she says. "I'm a pretty private person. Email is serious for me, I use it intimately. I don't think I'd do this even if someone asked me to. And I turn my internet off for most of the day."
- Independent
