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York/NEW YORK

York/NEW YORK was a curated project housing 10 new writing commissions available to view/read as a curated installation and open to international guests of the symposium and to the public. The installation took place in September 2008 at the Writing Encounters International Symposium at York St John University. The project was curated by Claire Hind and advice on the commissions was conducted in collaboration with Lenora Champagne and Claire MacDonald.

The project set out to research the results of writing under creative constraints for a specific technology with Hind establishing a series of rules for writing so that each commissioned writer wrote under a specific constraint and for a particular technology. The work interrogated the ways in which readers/speakers/performers chose to interpret the texts within the context of the curated performance and the given technology and produced findings relating to the private and communal aspect of curated installations. Of interest and analysis were the variants in attitudes in recordings for different devices and the time, speed and tempo of speaking a short 5 minute script.

The project has also been disseminated through a paper at the Neuberger Museum of Art in New York as part of an exhibition entitled British Subjects: Identity and Self: Fashioning 1967 – 2009. The paper spoke specifically about the research findings, predominately; the technology determined the narrative content of the writer’s work and, the technology also determined the reader’s approach to performing the scripts. The paper also focused upon Brian Chikwava’s text One Dandelion Seed Head - addressing the subtext of his work as a black artist ‘visiting Britain’ (2009). Chikwava’s autobiography when unpicked through the character of Sam (written for the 2008 commission of York/NEW YORK), addressed his hybrid identity for the character’s father to find on a Dictaphone. In March 2011, a paper was delivered at the Norwegian Theatre Academy which explored the relationship between, curator, writer and speaker in performance.