Shia LaBeouf just began another Hashtag Art Project called #ALONETOGETHER to follow up the hitchhiking one, the movie one, and the elevator one. The project, done in collaboration with Finland’s Kiasma Museum, will see Shia and his collaborators Nastja Ronkko and Luke Turner sequester themselves in a remote part of Finland for a month.
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Beginning today, LaBeouf, Ronkko, and Turner will set up camp in three separate cabins in Finland’s Lapland region, AP reports. Inside the Helsinki museum is another small cabin fitted with a video stream to the Lapland cabins. From the museum cabin, visitors will be able to speak directly to the artists, but LaBeouf, Ronkko, and Turner will only be able to respond via text. The artists will only be able to text museum visitors, and no one else — not even each other.
On the project’s website, anyone not in Finland can watch a live stream of the gallery with the artists’ texts streaming in real time on the bottom of the screen. The texts are sometimes difficult to follow, because there’s no way to tell exactly what they’re replying to, or who is sending them. But that one-sided disconnect somehow makes them even more interesting; it’s like eavesdropping on half a conversation and imagining the other half.
LaBeouf’s most recent (and probably his most controversial) project, He Will Not Divide Us, moved overseas last month after it was targeted by online trolls and Trump supporters and eventually shut down by the Museum of the Moving Image.
#ALONETOGETHER feels like a return to LaBeouf’s earlier work, which usually focuses on human interaction, communication, and shifting our idea of the modern celebrity. It’s not clear what kind of entertainment or luxuries the cabins are equipped with, if any, but LaBeouf’s preferred state of comfort seems to come from the idea that people are once again watching him.