Hats off to Tracey Moberly who has archived around 60,000 messages that she's received since 1999. TEXT ME UP! is a book in which she has compiled those messages, illustrating them lavishly. It's like her autobiography that is a work of art, labor and dedication. Tracey, 47, is a graduate from Newport School of Art and at 21, she decided to make Manchester her next home.

She has also been a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University through the second half of the 1990s.Moberly’s first TEXT-ME-UP! exhibition – using those texts in artworks – was held in Manchester in 2000. In her circle, she has some biggies like Banksy, Tony Benn, Alabama 3, Pete Doherty, Howard Marks etc.

 Tracey has been very kind to spare some time for an interview with us. Catch her interview below and get inspired:


Tracey, please introduce yourself to E-junkies.

Hello E-Junkies... I'm an interdisciplinary artist, author, activist, radio show producer/host and was co-owner of legendary art and music hangout, the Foundry, in Shoreditch, London. I lecture in Interactive Arts, Fine Art and Politics/Activism, and exhibit my work regularly. I have saved every text I have ever been sent since 1999 (although I lost the very first one) I have used it as a starting point from which to examine a section of my life, crafting a work that straddles art, literature,technology and popular culture.

Beautiful Books have just published Text-Me-Up! and it's available on Amazon.


Your 'Text-Me-Up' project is amazing! How did you think of such a creative idea?

It wasn't planned initially. I was coming out of a tumultuous relationship in 1999 when I received my first text. I didn't know what it was at first as the little envelope symbol came onto the screen of my mobile phone. A group of us huddled around my phone and managed to open and read the message which I promptly lost. I was fascinated by this immediate form of communication and eagerly awaited my next message coming through... I was on the top deck of a bus in Manchester UK, it was a miserable rainy Grey day when the next text message envelope pinged into my phone. I opened and read it, immediately experiencing a lovely sugar rush which completely lifted my mood. The texts started arriving more frequently and I began texting back. The random dialogue of sentiments and statements coming into my phone daily started to stitch back together my life.

The following year in June 2000 I held my first Text-Me-Up! art exhibition in Castlefield Gallery Manchester. Over the next decade I held a number of exhibitions around the UK using my collection of received text messages expressed in a variety of mediums. These included floating balloon exhibitions: I released thousands of balloons, each containing a unique recycled text message. As the balloons were found people replied by text, phone call, letters and card: there were some extremely interesting responses from this.

For the last six years I have been working on intricately embroidered received text messages for an upcoming show titled Text-Me-Up-Sex-Drugs & Rock'n'Roll. These are texts from celebrity friends who all have a high media profile. I am then using the same messages to create voodoo flags with traditional flag makers in Haiti. This is a country with whom I have strong links, having taken part in the 1st Ghetto Biennale in Haiti three weeks before the earthquake in 2009. I am attending the 2nd Ghetto biennale there later this year. While in Haiti I also did a mobilography project where I gave mobile phones with phone cameras to people from the Grand Rue area of Port-Au-Prince to photograph their lives.

Since 1999, you have been saving all of your text messages. That means, since more than a decade, you'd had plans to come up with this book?

I didn't know I was going to make a book out of all the the text messages I was receiving when I first began to collect them, but as my life continued to be sewn back together and flourish I was holding regular art exhibitions with them. When I moved to London, became the co-owner of the Foundry in Shoreditch and began traveling more and developing different work across the world I needed to put it together in a format that would tell a part of my story whilst documenting and archiving a slice of social and cultural history through the development and growth of a new technology.

Was it a big challenge...saving all those messages?

Yes, when I first started collecting text messages coming into my mobile, the phone would only store 10 messages. I had to write them down before deleting them. I started writing in notebooks, which became journals and on odd scraps of paper which I would transcribe into the journals. The message storing capacity changed in phones as text messaging became more popular. However as this changed the amount of people sending texts grew. By 2003 I was receiving on average 300-350 texts a month and by 2004 this had grown to 450+ a month. In 2005 I found a computer programme that enabled me to directly download them from my phone to computer which made things much easier.

How did you go about publishing the text messages in a book? Would you like to tell us the whole process?

Beautiful Books is a small independent publisher who loved the concept and ideas included within it and they wanted to publish it. When I'd written it, the book was put together and designed by Jonathan Moberly. Text-Me-Up! evolved into a number of strands and the book is a substantial body of work with 336 pages, it has around 2,500 images in it and three narratives. It illustrates some of the 60,000 texts I had saved at the time of writing the book. Received texts from 1999-2010 form the outer casing and occasionally core of each chapter. The autobiographical narrative which weaves through the book is an attempt to make sense of those texts. They mark time, carving a slice of social and cultural history. A third textual dimension of current day text correspondences are interspersed throughout in pink and red. The 17 received texts which begin and end each chapter were all selected randomly and this guided the autobiographical narrative. Over 3,000 of the text messages were used. I could write 40 different books based on this process, each with their own unique story.

Give us a few highlights of the book.

The blurb on the back cover reads:

'Artist Tracey Moberly has saved every single text message she has ever been sent. Text-Me-Up! is an autobiographical work in the author's words and images and the texts of others. Whether it be partaking in maggot racing in Moscow, having a revelatory experience in a Vodou temple, or becoming Sex and The City's carrie Bradshaw for a night out in New York - Tracey takes the text message to another dimension. The book is a zeitgeist journey through popular culture over the last decade, from the underground to the mainstream worlds of both music and art. Her web of text messages incorporates and weaves around some of popular culture's key figures, positioning them in place and time, including: Banksy, Bill Drummond, Howard 'Mr.Nice' Marks, Irvine Welsh, Tony Benn, Aiden Shaw, Pete Doherty, John Sinclair, Mark Thomas, Carl Barat and many more...'

I don't want to spoil the book for people reading the story, so I will elaborate slightly on the elements featured in the blurb and can highlight these:

The maggot racing in Moscow begins with me traveling the UK with a Firestreak air-to-air missile in the back of an ex-army Chevrolet to present to a large group of Russians involved in the first Russian Alco-film festival being hosted at my venue the Foundry in Shoreditch, East London, it follows the story of a week in the UK and the return trip to Moscow accompanied by 50 performers and artists including Pete Doherty, Gavin Turk and other YBA artists and musicians. It follows how a small group of us nearly get shot outside Lenin's tomb at 4am performing circus tricks; maggot racing and flea circus adventures in Russia's capital; how I plant all of Red Square with red poppy seeds; how we storm Russia's main tv station in a breakfast interview and go on to recreate a major scene from the Russian epic film Battleship Potemkin being lead by a Russian tv presenter.

The revelatory experience in a Vodou temple is part of the section of the book which focuses on Haiti and part of my work in the country three weeks before the earthquake - in the lead-up to this I am on a mission as part of my work there following a text conversation I had on a film set with my friend and subject of the film, Howard Marks. I had a few acting parts in the recently released Mr. Nice film and as a direct result of this find myself researching and sourcing puffer fish ovaries the toxin contained in them said to be responsible for creating the whole zombie myth and stories around slavery.

The book also plots the rise of the band the Libertines from Pete Doherty hosting poetry nights at the Foundry to the rise of the Libertines (and how I didn't manage them) to their first interview and chart success; it covers many aspects of my great friendship and work with Bill Drummond the artist and author who made up one half of the band KLF; how I get to lead the Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos's march in Mexico and so much more. The book also positions people in place and time, so it looks at some of the early work Banksy did with us and the trouble one of our friends got into when disreputable companies were able to send out adverts on mobile phone network; the work of other street artists Faile and Zevs; It places the anti war marches and the Afghanistan heroin market; The political trail and work I embark on with comedian and activist Mark Thomas looking into eight deaths on a Coca Cola bottling plant in Colombia and the work that developed from this and so much more.

What feedback have you received for your book? Tell us about the appreciation and criticism that you've received.

I have just started to receive a lot of radio and press interest on the book and I've found some amazing people emailing me through my website. I've started a Facebook page up too – Tracey Moberly Text-Me-Up Book. A few blogging sites have done interesting short features on the book without having seen it and knowing nothing of its contents. None of these bloggers know what the book features but they’ve put it out there. It's exciting as there have been no reviews yet as the book is just going into shops and being sold on Amazon. From the short pieces placed on blogging sites on the theme 'woman has collected 11 years of text messages...' I've started receiving lovely emails and press interest.

This is a contrast to some of the feedback comments actually written on the blogs, which can be judgmental and very misogynistic. It is surprising as it's mainly men responding and they are making uninformed comments on a book they haven't seen based on a short description. However given the nature of my work I obviously love this as they are reading between the lines, making lines up and mentally writing their own story (which is a large part of my fascination with text messages) so it’s making me want to do a piece of work on their responses alone! I'm looking forward to the reviews - good or bad, the book is about peoples lives through other peoples words which - in the process of collecting these words from a then new and developing technology - has carved out a slice of social and cultural history. Some people get this others don't.

Two of the most thoughtful pieces have emphasized the counter-cultrural nature of the book. Chimp magazine describes it as "an intriguing undertaking that has the feel of serious artefactual import, is well worth checking out - her story alone is an insanely eventful, bold, anecdote-strewn picaresque with a cast of hundreds and many an eye-opening cameo". And Sabotage Times has described it as "a chemical generation’s pocket-bible of real stories, real visionaries, real people, from Holloway to Haiti, all documented with photographic and SMS evidence."

What's next? What's next project you will be working on?

Another mobile phone related book and two exhibitions which are part featured in the book. These are Text-Me-Up-Sex-Drugs & Rock'n'Roll a series on celebrity friends based on the title theme all intricately embroidered (this has been in the making for six years); I am already working on the follow on book from Text-Me-Up! is begins with the end chapter of Text-Me-Up! this will be over a period of 3.5 years. I am working an an Art as Activism project with (comedian and activist Mark Thomas); 2 music EPs with Larry Love (Alabama 3); an art and sound project based on the first sounds coming out of the Large Hydron Collider in Cern and my ongoing work and adventures with Bill Drummond. I'm sure I will have forgotten some things.

What are the other things that interests you?

Most forms of art, photography, acting,politics and dancing, I do a lot of spinning & dying for example - A few years ago I unofficially opened London Fashion week with an 80 piece lingerie collection which i hand spun out of human hair for a BBC television programme called 'F.Off I'm a Hairy Woman' I have also carried out spinning and dyeing workshops at The Natural History Museum in London for example...

What message do you have for our readers?

Text-Me-Up! +44 7943 791599