Shoreditch Artist Publishes Text Message Book

By Hazel Last edited 150 months ago
Shoreditch Artist Publishes Text Message Book


Txt msgs r precious, cos they capture moments of life when ppl connect, on matters big or small :- )

Shoreditch artist Tracey Moberley has compiled all the text messages she has received and sent over 12 years into Text-Me-Up!, an autobiographical artbook, offering a snapshot of her professional and personal life as conducted through her mobile phone. It's more than a series of text messages reproduced on paper.

Moberley's own artworks are mixed in with her SMS collection and artist / celebrity friends including Banksy, Howard Marks and Pete Doherty have contributed short pieces. She was a co-founder of the Foundry, and established Hoxton as the place for alternative arts; she was there to see it close in May last year to become a hotel and luxury flats so there is a great deal of recent London history to be found in Moberley's mobile musings.

Text-Me-Up! is of interest as a soon-to-be historical document of how we once communicated, as Instant Messenger, Twitter, Facebook, Skype and so on will soon be too. All those DMs, IMs and @ replies can and do mean something, as Moberley shows in her book. We're all writing our autobiographies as we Tweet, text and update Facebook, and we're all leaving digital traces of ourselves all over the place. Just always check what you write before you press send - as Moberley shows, there's a lot in a seemingly mundane message that goes "I'm here now, where r u?".

Last Updated 14 September 2011