On February 6 2009, Matias Viegener logged into Facebook and wrote a short list of random things about himself. He had been tagged in a friend’s meme, “25 Random Things About Me,” and though it irked him, he decided to respond. The meme’s premise was simple: Write 25 unrelated facts about yourself, then ask 25 friends to compose their own list. The next day, Matias composed a second list, despite remarking in the first, “I don’t want to tell people things they don’t know about me.” Two days later, he wrote a third. Then a fourth. The question became: Is it possible, given our love of stories and human proclivity toward habit, to make a long and truly random list from one’s life? The 100 lists assembled in 2500 Random Things About Me Too set out to do just that, exploring along the way the relationships between family, memory, sexuality, social networks, and randomness—on and offline.
Viegener limited himself to a single day for each list, leaving his topics unlimited while aiming to avoid repititions. His reflections wander through past and present—the writing and art scenes of New York and Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s, his sexual adventures, his friendship with Kathy Acker, and his current art practice as a co-founder of the Fallen Fruit collaborative. Neither memoir nor diary but with aspects of each, 2500 Random Things About Me Too recalls the work of Joe Brainard and John Cage. It is an experiment in the construction of identity in a Facebook-drenched world of self-manufacturing and short attention spans. Possibly the first book to have been composed entirely on Facebook, 2500 Random Things About Me Too is a text-cloud raining art, dogs, sex, death, and fruit.
