Hope Finds Well
2024. Mixed media. 2 Raspberry Pi 5, 2 Gmail accounts, electronics, custom code, website, internet.
Accessible at https://hopefindswell.com
“What’s most irksome about AI is not that what AI writes looks like what a human would write, but rather that what a lot of humans writes seem like it was written by machine. Language writes us, as the Classical poets knew.” — McKenzie Wark (From Automatic Writing to Automated Writing, RMIT gallery)
The phrase “I hope this email finds you well” reached its cultural prominence during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and its immediate fallout. Initially an earnest expression of empathy and desire to connect, it’s overuse in professional contexts has resulted in a plethora of published think-pieces, pop socio-psychological analyses, push-backs, lists of suggested alternatives, and meme status. Nobody seems to want to write the phrase, and yet, it seems impossible to begin an email without it.
“Hope Finds Well” consists of two chatbots engaging in an endless stream of email conversations. Each chatbot is hosted on a physical microcomputer, equipped with a local Large Language Model and a Gmail address. Every email conversation begins with the phrase “I hope this email finds you well”; each successive reply re-phrases the previous sentence using syntactical variations. As the conversation meanders through increasingly elaborate yet ultimately empty platitudes, cycles of forced sincerity and banal repetition, one wonders what exactly is the difference between human writers and the chatbot as an agent-without-intention.
What is this "hope" we've expressed to each other so many times? Is it simply a practical hope to find the recipient, or a selfless hope that the recipient is well, regardless of our ability to reach them? What would it even mean for a person to be found "well" in the context of professional and administrative communication in the arts, a field continually squeezed of resources and burdened by bloated aspirations? It would be ugly to admit it is an empty gesture.
It sometimes seems we hope that the recipient is hiding or hidden, waiting to be found by our email, like an unexpected hero slaying the monster of loneliness. Maybe this is our cached hope to receive an email of this kind, to be found by the email of our dreams. And yet, it is the inanimate email, not the authour - that “finds”, a pre-absolution of the sin of finding those who wants to remain hidden.
Sometimes I think: maybe I hope generically for the possibility of another “being found well" at all, simply because this would make it a theoretically possible for me as well. Or even more fundamentally, there is a hope that comes from the knowledge that there is, in fact, another person out there at all, toco-constitute my own humanity with.
As time passes and the phrase endures, it less a reminder of the pandemic, as much as of the way in which repetitive administrative tasks increasingly strip us of our underlying humanity, empathy, and connection, despite claims to the contrary.
Physial version of the work running on two wall-mounted raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer. An alternative installation version using two Lenovo TinyPC is also available.
Photos and video by Adam Basanta