Getting to Know My Neighbors

A zine built from Joseph Wilcox's personal collection of anonymous ATM receipts, gathered without any initial intent to make art from them. "I want to know what people buy at the store, how much they have or don't have, how they keep themselves afloat, and how close they are to drowning," Wilcox has written of the project. The receipts, most pulled from shared ATMs, are stripped of any identifying context beyond the numbers themselves, balances, withdrawals, purchases, yet those numbers sketch a picture of the strangers who left them behind. Wilcox has described his zine-making as a deliberately low-effort practice, treating the accumulation of everyday ephemera (receipts here, rejection emails in a companion project) as material that becomes a zine once enough of it piles up, an art practice folded into ordinary life rather than set apart from it. The work poses a direct question: who are the people sharing a bank machine with you, and what does the money passing through it reveal about how close, or distant, that connection really is.