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Summary

A collaborative writing experiment with Eva Weinmayr and Eleanor Vonne Brown using an online text editor to write a live script from the London Art Book Fair creating imaginative fictional co-authored and situated narration. Prompt: “A well known public figure is circumnavigating the London Art Book Fair disguised as a librarian, a dementor or a stray dog. Writers are situated throughout the fair and its threshold, observing and collectively creating and reworking a rolling commentary with each other on possible sightings.”

For the London Art Book Fair 2018, founder of bookshop and art space X Marks the Bökship Eleanor Vonne Brown has collaborated with the Gallery to curate a series of events reimagining Whitechapel Gallery as the X Publishing School. Divided across five spaces, a lecture hall, a common room, assembly hall, library and a playground, the School takes Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Koenig, 1970, (Reprinted, Occasional Papers, 2014) as its curriculum. Filliou writes: ‘The purpose of this study is to show how some of the problems inherent to teaching and learning can be solved – or at least eased – through an application of the participation techniques developed by artists in such fields as: happenings, events, action poetry, environments, visual poetry, films, street performances, non-instrumental music, games, correspondences, etc.’ Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts can be described as a study on experimental pedagogy based on the principles of Fluxus and kindred, participatory art movements of Filliou’s era. For example the publication’s design enacts the principles it discusses: the text is punctuated with blank spaces left for the reader to fill—an invitation to collaborate and co-author the book. Filliou’s invitation to the reader to become the writer was the starting point of this collaborative writing workshop. Eight participants distributed over different spaces at the Whitechapel Art Gallery during the London Art Book Fair shared one and the same online writing pad. This experiment in collaborative writing resulted in a story, which formed in real-time by reading and reacting to, adding to, changing or refining the unfolding narrative.