Somebody App

The Somebody App is a messaging service by Miranda July, It’s created with the support of Miu Miu, and launched August 28, 2014. Send your friend a message…a stranger will deliver it verbally! Or you can deliver someone else’s message! Somebody works when lots of people in the same area download it so invite your friends! Or bring a friend to one of our official hotspots (or… make your own Somebody hotspot!)

Somebody movie, by Miranda July. Notice the clothing it’s all Miu Miu for Fall 2014. (somebody – Miu Miu- women’s tales #8)

“Test my soil. Deeper.” Have you ever found it impossible to say something, face to face, to someone you know, someone you love? The words just won’t come out? A new messaging service, SOMEBODY, by Miranda July could help. It’s the star of her film for Miu Miu Womens’ Tales, the eighth commission in the acclaimed short-film series by women directors who critically celebrate femininity in the 21st century. Jessica wants to tell Caleb she can’t be his girlfriend anymore. She opens up SOMEBODY, types in the heartbreaking message, and selects Paul from a list. Paul is in the park. Paul’s phone dings. He eyes Caleb having a picnic. Paul delivers the bad news—as Jessica. Eyes bawling. Arms flapping. Caleb is, devastated. The SOMEBODY app then totally saves Yolanda and Blanca’s friendship, makes Jeffy’s marriage proposal to lonely Victoria, and initiates a curious ménage-a-trois between two prison workers and a parched potted plant named Anthony. This latest addition to Womens’ Tales showcases Miranda July’s unique ability to capture the strange tenderness of contemporary relationships. Somebody takes our endless hunger for communication, technology, avatars and outsourcing, and blends it into what seems to be a surreal near-future — but it’s not. It’s right now. In close collaboration with Miu Miu, July worked with a team of developers to create this radical and complex app; when the movie ends we’re invited to visit somebodyapp.com to send or deliver our first message. (via Miu Miu)

About Miu Miu’s Women tales is a project by Miucca Prada’s Miu Miu which showcases short films by female directors This project started in 2012 and premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

About Miranda July; Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. She wrote, directed and starred in the The Future (2011) and (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. July’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-six countries. The non-fictional It Chooses You (McSweeney’s) was published in 2011. In 2000 July created the seminal participatory website, Learning to Love You More, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel); the work is now in collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. July’s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. She designed Eleven Heavy Things, an interactive sculpture garden, for the 2009 Venice Biennale; it was also presented in Union Square in New York (2010) and by Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2011). In 2013 104,897 people from 170 countries subscribed to her email-based artwork, We Think Alone (commissioned by Magasin 3, Stockholm.) July’s first novel, The First Bad Man, will be published by Scribner in early 2015. Raised in Berkeley, California, she lives in Los Angeles.