Gideon Jacobs & Gregor Hochmuth. Confession

About

Approximately one year ago, Jacobs and Hochmuth launched a hotline that paired up those who wanted to confess with those who wanted to take confession. Confessors were able to speak for as long as the listener remained on the line, but listeners could only listen, as they were muted. Jacobs and Hochmuth designed this specific set up because they believed for a confession to be truly cathartic, the confessor must feel both safe and vulnerable, anonymous but heard. All audio was recorded -- users were made aware of this at the beginning of each call. As of today, the archive has amassed thousands of entries. 

Gideon Jacobs is a writer and artist based in Queens, NY. Shortly after graduating Tufts University, he spent four years working at the renown photo cooperative Magnum Photos, where he was eventually named Creative Director. He left that organization in 2015 to write, and has since served as a columnist for VICE, and contributed to The New Yorker, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, It's Nice That, Buzzfeed, and others. He just published his first work of fiction titled "Screenshots" -- a collection of very short stories all written in the Notes app of his iPhone. 

Greg Hochmuth is an artist and engineer based in New York. He studied computer science at Stanford University and worked as a product manager at Google. In 2011, he joined Instagram as one of the company's first engineers. Greg left Instagram in 2014 to move to New York and work on new projects at the intersection of art and technology. He has published a series of projects since, including Network Effect in collaboration with Jonathan Harris, which was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the 2016 ICP Infinity Award for New Media. In late 2016, Greg co-founded and is now working on Dreams, a new TV network based in New York.