Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

25 PIECES OF PAPER is a series of twenty-five interactive and dynamic poems investigating one Edward Guthrie. The project title is taken from a rule of thumb in cultural anthropology that holds that every adult person bom and grown to adulthood in the Western world since 1900 has at least twenty-five pieces of paper documenting their existence. These pieces of paper include birth, baptism, marriage and death certificates, tax identification numbers, school diplomas - in short, all manner of official records use to archive our passage from cradle to grave. Edward Guthrie name once appeared on a birth certificate. When he/I was adopted, that name was replaced with mine.