Can communal editing
become a form of participatory
arts experience?
The Project
ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
The Blue & Green Project explores methods of communal editing and the ways in which creative response can be used as an expansive form of annotation. We are inspired by existing communal editing projects, such as The Cantos Project. However, rather than gathering traditional, academic annotations - with the purpose of factually informing the reader - The Blue & Green Project considers editing as a form of participatory arts practice.
Academic annotation is undoubtedly interesting and useful. Yet, at the same time, it might narrow interpretations of the text to a received reading. As Hockney says of his etchings that accompany another set of cantos, Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Man With the Blue Guitar’, these annotations will not be ‘conceived as literal illustrations of the [text] but as an interpretation of its themes’ (The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney who was inspired by Wallace Stevens who was inspired by Pablo Picasso, 1977). We hope that this work will visualise the multitude of readings that a text offers, encouraging a reader to think both expansively and personally about the text in a way that factual annotations may not illicit. When many creative annotations layer onto the text, it can become a site where new connections form; where a community resides.
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The Blue & Green project was conceived by Ane Lopez and Eloise Birtwhistle. Initially, seventeen artists working across seven different mediums (including illustration, sculpture, creative writing, and musical composition) were approached to create annotations. These artists are: Judit Sanchez, Rebecca Gill, Maria Sledmere, Bärbel Praun, Emma Hislop, Ane Lopez, Ines Gradot, Sean Patrick Campbell, Yawen Li, Zoë Birtwhistle, Finn Arschavir, Lucy Maria, Tania Cimatti, Jonny Walker, Julia Syrzistie, Eloise Birtwhistle and Desmond Clarke.
The annotations are exhibited on The Blue & Green Project website. This online platform uses hyperlink to mimic the experience of following footnotes and our hope is that The Blue & Green Project will continue to expand. We have an open submission for creative annotations, which will be reviewed quarterly. If you would like to submit an annotation yourself, please click here to find out how.
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This project was commissioned by the Imprints of the New Modernist Editing project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The website will be exhibited alongside other commissioned artwork in the Imprints exhibition at Shandy Hall, Yorkshire, in August 2021.