Learning to Love You More: An Analysis of Connection, Sincerity, and Digital Culture
The human experience is interwoven with the complexities of love, connection, and self-discovery. In a world saturated with fleeting interactions and digital noise, the collaborative public art project Learning to Love You More (LTLYM), created by artists Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, offers a unique perspective on how people connect, act, and love. Understanding the nuances of love, both for oneself and others, is a lifelong journey.
The Art of Loving: A Skill to Be Mastered
In his insightful treatise on love, Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh cautions that "To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love." This sentiment challenges the common cultural notion of love as a passive experience, something that simply happens to us. Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, echoes this sentiment, arguing that love is not merely a sentiment but a skill that requires deliberate practice and personal growth. He emphasizes that the pursuit of love is bound to fail unless one actively develops their total personality, achieving a productive orientation characterized by humility, courage, faith, and discipline.
Fromm highlights a common misconception: that the primary problem lies in being loved rather than in one's capacity to love. People often believe that loving is simple, but finding the right person to love-or to be loved by-is the challenge. This perspective stems from the nature of modern society. The initial feeling of oneness when strangers connect can be exhilarating, especially for those who have felt isolated. However, this initial excitement often fades as intimacy wanes and disillusionment sets in.
The only way to overcome this pattern, Fromm argues, is to recognize love as an informed practice rather than an unmerited grace. He proposes that love is an art, akin to music, painting, or medicine, requiring both theoretical knowledge and practical application. Mastering any art necessitates a deep commitment, where nothing else in the world holds greater importance.
"Learning to Love You More": Interactive Assignments and Public Participation
Learning to Love You More (LTLYM) was an interactive web-based project that ran from 2002 to 2009. Fletcher and July invited anyone with Internet access to participate by completing and submitting their interpretations of assignments posted online. These assignments, often detailed and exacting, prompted participants to engage with their surroundings in specific ways, fostering interactions with neighbors, strangers, objects, and public spaces.
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The submissions, diverse in form and content, became a series of crowd-sourced "reports" displayed on the site. These reports included objects, drawings, written text, links to personal webpages or blogs, photos, and audio-visual media, depending on the nature of the assignment.
Some assignments were lighthearted, while others were deeply personal. Examples include:
- "Draw a scene from a movie that made you cry"
- "Perform the phone call someone else wished they could have"
- "Make a video of someone dancing"
- "Make a banner of something encouraging you often tell yourself and hang the banner in a place where you or someone else might need encouragement"
- "Make a field guide to your yard"
- "Take a flash photo under your bed"
- "Make a poster of shadows"
- "Make an exhibition of the art in your parent’s house"
- "Re-enact a scene from a movie that made someone else cry"
Fletcher and July’s past work has often included participatory elements, democratizing the art process and challenging traditional roles of artist and audience. They collaborated with web designer Yuri Ono to build a platform that would encourage people to participate in their project. The artists envisioned the site as a hub for both the activation and archiving of experiences and interactions prompted by the assignments. The site did not include comment or "like" features.
New Sincerity and the Rejection of Irony
The banners created for Assignment #63 declare hopeful sentiments ranging from the defiant (“Riot!”) to the deliberately ambiguous (“the light! the glow!”), the cheeky posted over a toilet (“It will all come out okay.”), and the platitudinous (“Don’t give up.”). Viewed en masse, as a series, the banners start to seem more desperate than encouraging, declaring, one after the other: “Someone will love you soon,” “You are not your paycheck,” “You have a spine!” “You still have both of your legs,” “One day you will be cool,” “You are not boring,” “You matter”…
Something emerges from Assignment #63’s apparent sincerity that undercuts its sweetness. Something like an incidental self-deprecating humor; an awareness of the absurdity of the whole exercise. This impulse is consistent with a phenomenon particular to contemporary literature, art, and in many cases, television and media called “New Sincerity.” It is best summarized as an aesthetic and conceptual set of strategies for recuperating connection and communication in a cultural moment imperiled by capitalist assimilation, postmodern fatalism, and the onset of rapid cultural change brought about by new technologies.
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The project's emphasis on sincerity can be seen as a response to the detachment and irony prevalent in late 20th-century art. For more than a century, overt sentiment has carried cultural suspicion. What once signaled moral seriousness came to be associated with kitsch, manipulation, and emotional excess. To be sincere was to risk embarrassment. LTLYM refuses that protection. It does not defend sincerity in theory. It performs it. By issuing instructions, it scripts opportunities for connection without resolving whether that connection is pure, naïve, or compromised. The feeling happens first.
Emotion and Connection in the Digital Age
Fletcher and July stated that their intent with LTLYM was to “use the web and use the computer as a means to get people to leave their computer,” and engage with the world, and in so doing, break participants’ habits of seeing and relating to their immediate spheres. LTLYM is both a catalyst for action and a record of actions past in this regard. Many of the project’s assignments are intended to alter the perceived quality of a person, place, or thing by transforming the participant’s affective connection to it.
The project operates within a logic of circulation, testing whether emotion can travel between strangers. In Assignment #47, participants reenact a scene from a movie that made someone else cry, even without knowing the original person who was moved by the scene. As hundreds of participants document vulnerable encounters, cherished objects, or handmade encouragement, the archive functions like a slow-moving emotional field, where tenderness accumulates and awkwardness echoes.
In a digital culture increasingly organized around volatility, LTYM models a different experiment: What if we engineered not outrage, but care? What if circulation did not depend on spectacle, but on small, sincere acts repeated by strangers? The project does not claim to solve the problem of authenticity online. It simply demonstrates that emotion will spread either way.
In our current digital landscape, social media platforms often amplify emotions, pairing outrage with outrage and disgust with disgust. Learning to Love You More offers an alternative, suggesting that the internet can be used to cultivate care and connection through small, sincere acts.
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Conservation and Preservation of Net Art
In 2010, SFMOMA acquired the LTLYM web project and physical archive. The museum agreed to work with local artists to curate or design future exhibitions, perpetuating the project's participatory and collaborative nature.
Assessing, documenting, and conserving artworks from both national and international collections is part of the Academy of the Arts in Bern’s formal conservation training program. Against the backdrop of the conservation training program, LTLYM offers a plethora of aspects for not just emerging conservators to immerse themselves in. Such issues and manifestations of loss are increasingly common amongst other web-based artworks from the early 2000s. In the last decade, with the rising influx of time-based media and digital art in museum collections, considerable research has been conducted in the relatively new field of net art conservation. Developments continue with increased appreciation for the value and recognition of the vulnerability of these artworks. However, conservation-tried-and-tested approaches as fundamental as condition reporting have yet to be established.
The project raises important questions about the conservation and preservation of net art. Due to its reliance on the unstable environment of the Web, its visual appearance has changed over time, and most of its large number of audio-visual media files have become unviewable.
As with any conservation project, the first step was to assess the work’s condition. Ralph Michel developed a migration prototype with the help of Mark Hellar, Technical Consultant at SFMOMA, and Nicole Christiane Savoy worked on an emulation prototype with support from Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director at Rhizome. Emulation and code migration are currently the most widely used methods for conserving net art.
Code migration refers to the process of updating a programming language to a newer version, for example HTML 4.0 to HTML5, or as in the case of LTLYM, converting from one programming language (PHP) to another (HTML). This approach required transcoding LTLYM‘s media files to a contemporary format (webm) compatible with HTML5 and the latest browsers. Emulators are software that mimic computer systems or environments. They can be built to run obsolete operating systems and other software like legacy versions of Windows, media players and browsers. Emulation allows users to experience the work in the environment in which it was created, without altering its code or files.
A multistep approach was applied to the preservation of the broken external links. In a next step, Internet Archive captures were chosen of all links whose original destinations no longer existed on the live Web. Since such captures are taken randomly, resulting in variable capture dates and completeness, those that most successfully portrayed the links’ contents and functionality from the time they were posted to LTLYM were selected.
Collaborations such as these are an important step in the development of the relatively new and variable field of net art conservation.
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