Want to get personal emails from Lena Dunham, Kirsten Dunst, Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy, or maybe Sheila Heti, author of the coolest coming-of-age novel yet, How Should a Person Be? Well, from today you can. 

For her new project, We Think Alone, artist Miranda July has delved into the email outboxes of the aforementioned as well as filmmaker Kareen Abdul-Jabbar, Israeli writer Etgar Keret, photographer Catherine Opie, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and Vietnamese artist Dahn Vo, and will share their selected sent items with anyone who signs up to receive them, every Monday until November 11.

The idea: twenty emails, delivered over twenty weeks will illustrate that even the most mundane emails are a telling insight into the psyche of its sender. 
‘I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people — to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent — the more mundane the better’ July commented. ‘How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view. We Think Alone has given me the excuse to read my friends’ emails and the emails of some people I wish I was friends with and for better or worse it’s changed the way I see all of them. I think I really know them now’.

With people spending so much time online, the characters we create for ourselves throughout communications are increasingly significant, ‘but our inner life is not actually the same thing as our life on the computer’ July notes. ‘A quiet person might !!!! a lot. A person with a busy mind might write almost nothing. And of course while none of these emails were originally intended to be read by me (much less you [emails are taken from before the project began])  they were all carefully selected by their authors in response to my list of email genres — so self-portraiture is quietly at work here’.  

Sign up now for a voyeuristic glimpse into what these famous figures have been sending.