As a 2016 New-Year’s welcome, the ScreenSaverGallery hosted a performance by (c) merry, character of which was un-noticed in advance.

While saving your screen, it could be noticed that the performance was based on the live-streaming of (c) merry writing an improvised piece of fiction text, without previous preparation or thoughts.

The writing process (and streaming of it) took place November 1, 2016, and the genre, topic, motifs, characters and evolvement of the story all came from momentary real-time impulsive inspirations of New Year’s Day—not without risk, however.

The performance’s theme was the creative process of writing, as parallel to socialising processes in society, and the juxtaposition of screen saver and literature, as medium considerably older, most important, and least likely to function as a real screen saver in one’s PC.

It was the process, really, that was put into forth in this performance, since the screen saving principles made any interaction with the text from side of the viewer impossible.^[1] One could only follow the place in the document where the cursor was temporarily placed—with author’s coming back and forth in the story, deleting and re-writing parts of the nascent text, using various colours, writing in unchronological way, filling the missing paragraphs, even communicating with the viewers as in broadcast (putting on the INTERMISSION times), inserting existential passages and echoes from the past and also commenting on her physical and mental discomfort while writing the piece of text, all of which influenced the direction of the brief story being told.

It was only after the completion of the creative process, when we can see the fiction text in its entirety, translate and understand its results (as also this accompanying text is written and being published after the performance took place).

The final text of the story can be read on this page // English Google Translation

The text of 1. 1. 2xx6 by (c) merry is under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

1. 1. 2xx6

Happy New Year // Štastnej novej rok

on-line performance by (c) merry, 1. 1. 2016 CET

Documentation of performance on display as google-translate-able text in our word press archive.

With special thanks to Tomáš Javůrek and Barbora Trnková, whose technical support and curatorial trust made this performance possible.

(c) merry is Czech artist based primarily on Internet. Under the name Mary Meixner (*1986) she acts as critical and theoretical writer and curator, concerned primarily with Internet art. She is ia editor of Experimental cinema, moving image and contemporary art section of Film magazine 25fps, co-curates Screen Saver Gallery and PAF, Festival of film animation and contemporary art in Olomouc, Czech Republic.

She graduated in English Philology, Film Studies and Media Studies and is in her PhD studies of Art Education (UPOL, Czech Republic).

Curated by: Tomáš Javůrek & Barbora Trnková

^[1] Including unnecessary Google translation of it, since the story was intentionally written in Czech, language most of the ScreenSaverGallery users aren’t familiar with.