madelinesnotes.cloud

When Madeline Greenberg commissioned me to create a portrait of her based on personal data she'd collected across Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. I wasn't sure where to start... until I discovered every note she's typed into her Apple Notes app since 2017.

Reading through that felt criminally invasive, like reading her diary. Or maybe more like reading her mind. I felt like her heart was on the screen in a way it can never quite be when we're sharing content online that's intended for an unknowable, ever expanding audience. The notes she typed over the years into Apple's app on her phone or laptop were clearly always intended for herself and herself alone.

In her manifesto Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell writes that "the machine is a material through which we process our bodily experience." A physical notebook, journal, or diary has long served as a way for us to process our experiences, but what does that exercise look like (and feel like) when our digital version of those tools is uploaded to the cloud?