Writing Tests/First Drafts

As part of my PhD I created a cumulative glossary which existed online and in publication form. Contributors included artists from my exhibition A Strange Weave of Time and Space plus invited writers Esther Leslie, Lucy Steeds, Michelle Atherton and Matthew Cheeseman.

In 1985, as part of the exhibition Les Immateriaux, at the Pompidou Centre, co-curator Jean Francois Lyotard issued a number of writers with minitel machines and a list of words to create a cumulative glossary of terms related to the exhibition.

Although pre-internet, these machines allowed the writers to view each others writing in real time and respond and add to them to create a polyvocal set of ‘definitions’, with multiple voices interwoven. The result was Epreuves D’Ecriture, which translates as Writing Tests or First Drafts and which was then printed up as part of the exhibition catalogue. In Lyotard’s “rules of the game” writers were invited to give their ‘definitions’ (“2-10 lines maximum”) of multiple terms from of a supplied list of words related to the exhibition, and also respond to (“refute, complete, modulate, etc”) the inputs of other writers.

Now with collaborative online writing prevalent with Wikipedia etc, but with exhibition catalogues still mostly comprised of univocally authored essays, this project was revisited to cumulatively and collectively define a new set of terms, in relation to the exhibition ‘ A Strange Weave of Time and Space’.

The online version of the glossary is viewable here and the publication is published by Site Gallery, ISBN 978-1-899926-11-4. The publication was designed by Daniel Royle. The cover design refers to the cellophane catalogue cover of the original Les Immateriaux catalogue.