OneZero: What did you want to achieve with the project?

Nastja Säde Rönkkö: The starting point was when I realized how young the internet is, and how much it has changed us, our relationships, our society. If it was taken away one day, we couldn’t function, yet it’s only 30 or so years ago when we could be perfectly okay without it. I’d also read quite a lot about the environmental impact of the internet. I wanted to figure out if there was a way to, if not get back to being off-line completely, maybe to be more balanced in our use of the internet.

It’s something we really miss, in a way — that kind of slow communication where you really think about what you say. A letter is almost like a diary. People open up.

Getting away from the internet isn’t just a matter of switching off your phone, because it’s so pervasive in nearly every aspect of life. Where did you draw the line?

It was actually really difficult because there were a lot of situations where I used the internet secondhand. A really good example was having dinner with friends, and people were playing Spotify playlists. I thought, am I using the internet now by listening to this? I’m not physically using it, but I am a part of it. So I came up with a set of rules. If I ask for directions, for example, I can’t ask people to Google things for me. I only used cash, because contactless payments are online. But if I listened to music from someone else’s phone at a party, that was fine.

And you had to write letters instead of sending emails and texts.

The letter-writing wasn’t the main thing at the beginning, but it became the biggest thing because the response was overwhelming. I just got so many letters. It made me think it’s something we really miss, in a way — that kind of slow communication where you really think about what you say. When you text someone you can edit yourself; you can easily draft and rewrite. A letter is almost like a diary. People open up.

Did it affect the way you expressed yourself?

I felt I shared a lot more personal feelings. If I’m going to make the effort to buy paper and write a letter, and go to the post office and mail it, you want it to be meaningful and interesting for whoever is receiving it. It’s also quite common to have long email threads that are unnecessary, with something that could be said in a few sentences instead of 10 emails about one useless thing. Because I also used letters for work, they were intense thick letters but all the information was there. It was efficient, even though it felt slow.

Did your daily routine change to make time for correspondence?

I think it really became the thing that I did. A lot of people have asked me what I did every day. I wrote letters. I’d go into my studio in the morning, and it would take forever to write a letter or to respond to a letter, especially if it was a long one. So it was pretty much office hours responding and writing. I guess it’s what we do with email, but it felt nicer. I felt like I could focus. If I wrote a letter to you, I would write it only to you. I wouldn’t get distracted by notifications, or sidetracked by reading an article. I realized how addicted we are to the internet, including myself. It was quite scary. It’s so easy to be online. There was a sensibility in almost all of the letters of missing that earlier way of communicating.

Are there any particular letters that have stayed with you?

I don’t want to pick one letter as the most important, but I think letters from people who I didn’t know were interesting. How did you find me? How do you know where I am? There was one letter, the last letter I received, which was a love letter to me. It was very over the top, and at the end of it they said it was a joke. That stayed with me because it was really well-written. It creeped me out. I couldn’t Google the person. It was really creepy. But it was a joke. Other people wrote to me about the internet and the environment, and I had some really good exchanges with them.

You mentioned before that the environment was partly behind your original thinking for the project.

I started to read about deep water cables, and massive storage warehouses, and it was fascinating how physical the internet is, how it needs constant cooling and electricity. But when we use our phones we don’t really know where it comes from. Every time I fly, I say, “Argh, I’m destroying the world.” Internet video streaming worldwide has an enormous carbon footprint. Why don’t we talk about this? We talk about cutting dairy and meat and flying, but it’s so difficult to calculate the environmental impact of, say, watching a video online.

Would you do it again? Would you take a similar gap from life on the internet?

I couldn’t do it for six months. I already lost quite a few opportunities at work during that time. There were invitations that went into my email and people didn’t follow up on. I was expecting that, but I wouldn’t do it again. But I really wanted to do it, and do it in a big city. I didn’t want it to feel like a retreat where I would go into the woods alone and live off-line for six months. I tried to be quite active in terms of communicating with people and really being in the city. That was important. I felt like a time traveler. It was quite lonely at times. I felt like I was in a different reality to everybody else.