Melanie Index (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781916541238)

Composed of screenshots, postcards, indices, Google searches, browsing histories, alt text, excerpts of unfinished novels, and other reading formats, Melanie Index is an experiment in processing the metadata of a married couple's shared life. Traveling through several foreign cities, they repeat their marriage in compressed formats, shopping, browsing galleries, drinking Starbucks, watching TV, noticing the transient and permanent elements of their life. At a certain point, the documents of their life transform into an essayistic elegy in which the narrator reflects on the consequences of traveling and shedding data globally, the potential of networked technologies to change how we love one another. Who do we love in a networked world? Is the humanistic tradition of romantic love obsolete, or perhaps modified by telecoms and on-demand content delivery? Melanie Index might be considered a Romance adapted to a world of high-powered personal computing, or it might be a conceptualist study of the codex and its attendant literary forms as obsolete or irrelevant communications systems.