Institute History
Description
Me and You and Everyone We Know is a story about children and adults with impossible desires living at a time when coming of age is a digital process and reality is an aesthetic choice. Seven-year-old Rory is engaged in an Internet romance. His father is begging for a miracle that will allow his family to be reborn as a more convincing family. Nine-year-old Sylvie wants to spend her entire childhood building a dowry. Teenaged Heather believes in her constitutional right to know the fantasies men have about her. Paulie says all the right things to Gemma, but only when she's reading them from the script Gemma wrote.
These desires place them within range of each other's breath, but rarely into sexual or even actual contact. Real connections, objects, and lives are either over-valued or not valued at all within this world. This is a landscape of public places heated by private fantasies—Radio Shacks, department stores, art museums—and of devastatingly cold bedrooms and living rooms. Instead of laying hands on skin, these people choose to send signals with cardboard signs and yoga postures. But they have not forgotten the possibility of utopia. It both propels and repels their love; it surges within them as a vision of the future, the past, a video, and email, a geometrically perfect grid.