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| | | Re-defining
Designed and produced by Karen Bleitz
Self-contained text play-box constructed of wood, ring binder, silkscreened metal sheets and magnets. Texts on the theme of ‘Generation X’ and photocopied sheets composed and inserted by readers. Unique bookwork, 33 x 27 x 5cm. London, 1997
‘I began to explore the bulletin boards on the internet, where users can manipulate other people’s texts and spit their own ideas back into cyber space. The piece sprang from the idea of giving the conventional page the possibilities available to digital documents. I silkscreened different texts onto 3 metal sheets. The first text was Douglas Coupland’s glossary from his book Generation X, the next was a marketing report commissioned by the sponsors of the Lollapalooza festival called Targeting the Stoned Cyber Punk, which discussed the best ways to approach and sell to a crowd they assumed was emotionally and mentally impaired by drugs. The third text was a rebuttal to the media’s labelling titled, ‘Don’t call me Generation X, call me a child of the 80’s,’ in which the author fondly reminisces about a childhood of consumerism. Ironic or not, his comments placed him in the bulls-eye of the festival sponsors’ target market. The words of the 3 texts were re-silkscreened onto magnets and placed in their original order on the metal sheets. I took them to pubs, cafes and clubs and left them laying around for people to read, reflect upon, and rewrite. When I went back to collect them, the texts were always re-arranged. The metal sheets were photocopied and, over time, grew into the book Re-defining.’
(Cathy Courtney interview 1999)
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