Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2016

This piece is in the form of a graphic list of subconscious writings originally derived from a series of text messages that were deconstructed letter by letter and then reformed by assuming words from the displaced letters. The piece demonstrates how writing under a deliberate rule causes an uncommon textual disposition with an overall blurred meaning. The piece takes the shape of a horizontal line graph that acknowledges the ups and downs of the quotidian.

This piece is in the form of a graphic suite of 31 digital collages for the 31 days of January, starting with ‘#wellness’ and ending with ‘#trump’. The piece is a meta-lexicon and cipher for the platform it takes as its medium. Hashtags and appropriated and subtly reworked images are collaged together, using the virtual platform they inhabit as a ground for détourned mingling. The artist plays a disassociation game with hashtags, using them as an unpredictable pathway to the next word or phrase. As the hashtags accumulate, each addition to the snaking words is combined with an image from the ‘Instaarchive’ to create new puns and misapprehensions.

FOUR WORDS was curated by Alan Dunn in collaboration with Metal Liverpool as part of their series of January urban provocations. FOUR WORDS presented 100 ten-second text animations on Europe’s largest digital screen opposite Lime Street Station in Liverpool. Contributions came from local community and youth groups, alongside more recognized practitioners including Gerhard Richter, Shaista Aziz, Douglas Coupland, The Andy Warhol Foundation, Paul Morley and a priest, retired seafarer, radio station and David Fairclough (Liverpool FC striker, 1975–83). See www.alandunn67.co.uk/fourwords.html for documentation of the project.

The Action Score Generator is an online writing machine that writes and re-writes an infinite series of performance event scores. The source texts collect together previously performed actions by artist Nathan Walker between 2006 and 2013. The scores are arranged into poetic, six-word-length instructions, aligning performance objects, tasks, verbs and spaces that are reorganized endlessly by a JavaScript code. The Action Score Generator aligns itself with the short poetic texts of Fluxus Event Scores and with rhythms of computational data and visual poetry. An Action Score Generator book is published by IF P THEN Q Press, Manchester, including an Afterword by Mark Leahy entitled ‘An action movie (for NW): Reading time code action’.

The Royal Road to the Unconscious (information as material, 2003) was conceived by the artist Simon Morris in order to conduct an experiment on Sigmund Freud’s writing. Utilizing Ed Ruscha’s book Royal Road Test as a readymade set of instructions, 78 students cut out every single word from Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. On Sunday, 1 June 2003, the artist Simon Morris (thrower) threw the words out of the window of a Renault Clio Sport on Redbridge Road, Crossways, Dorset, travelling at a speed of 90mph, approximately 122 miles south-west of Freud’s psychoanalytical couch in London. The action freed the words from the structural unity of Freud’s text as it subjected them to an ‘aleatory moment’ – a seemingly random act of utter madness.

Posh Man’s Pet was commissioned for How Not To Be Distant, a symposium concerning forms of vulnerability in art practice, with Matthew McQuillan, Adrian Rifkin and Nina Wakeford. The symposium accompanied the exhibition Concerning The Bodyguard, curated by Laura Morrison for The Tetley, Leeds in 2014.