There’s a very fine line between life as it’s lived and art. I am interested in on-line archives, so even my forays into the terribly scary world of on-line dating are fraught with possibilities.

While in the UK last year, I met Jon Giraffe on the Guardian’s soulmates. Early on, I asked  for permission to play with the email correspondence, our text messages, and eventual interactions on facebook. Giraffe’s a brave soul and agreed.

I’m playing with the email archive now: extracting subject headers – hilarious, plugging the lot (21,999 words) into wordle – revealing and hilarious, taking a look at the nature of the images and links exchanged, and perhaps most interestingly, reflecting on my own end of the correspondence vis a vis notions of identity and how I chose to represented myself as a single, mother-landed Canadian.

I have no idea where this is going, but I’m grateful for Giraffe’s trust in me, and our mutual decision early on to make this relationship last forever by not letting it happen in the first place.

First paragraph reply to Jon Giraffe when he asked if I would prefer to use ‘real’ email instead of the Gaurdian soulmates’ platform for correspondence: