Robbie Dawson

In transforming a year-long WhatsApp conversation into a book, 'A Family Chat' interrogates the methods, obstacles, and concessions involved in wresting ownership of personal data from untrusted and uncooperative corporate databases and transforming it into a form compatible with the printed book. In doing so, the project encounters tensions between communication and archiving – with the online chat continuing unabated in the meantime – and publishing – with chat subjects becoming custodians of their own data, controlling the extent of distribution by mutual consent. The data moves from the encrypted space of WhatsApp to Lulu, as a pre-press and print service only, with participants retaining control over distribution, and to GitHub, as an access-controlled digital repository. A public video documents the form of the book.