Eleanor Greenhalgh Description

WHAT

Open Sauce was a collaborative, online writing project which took place in Spring 2011. A short text (a stereotypical love scene composed of sentences lifted from various Mills & Boon romance novels) was made available on a wiki. Site visitors were invited to edit the story, and save their changes with a comment. Each contributor, upon saving, agreed to surrender any copyright in their contribution so that the process could continue. At first minor changes were made, such as the gender pronouns used, or the setting, giving way to more and more extensive edits which eventually re-wrote the text entirely.

A piece of custom software created a simple interface through which the text's revision history and changes could be browsed. This interface was shown in a gallery space, along with a separate room in which visitors could contribute their own edit to the text.

There was no single piece of definitive documentation but a series of events and new works contributed by interested practitioners. These included essays analysing the evolution of the text, a spoken-word performance, and a lecture addressing the shortfalls of open source culture in regard to gender and sexuality.

When the show closed, the wiki permissions were changed to disable editing. All 108 versions of the text were left online, made explicitly available to anyone who wished to re-use them. Whenever notification arrives of such re-use in another project, a link is added to the list of documentation on the Open Sauce site.

HOW

I composed the base text for Open Sauce by lifting sentences from around 20 different Mills & Boon paperback romance novels, in such a way that they would fit together as a convincing pastiche. The text was uploaded to the project's website (hosted by activist collective OX4), and settings in the site's Drupal content management system adjusted to allow site visitors to make and save changes to the text. Participants were recruited via email, social networking and word of mouth. I also recruited a number of writers to encourage contributions, by featuring them and their work on the site alongside their edits. At the end of the project, more artists & writers were recruited through personal contact to document the process. Throughout the project I acted as facilitator/curator, deciding how long the text would remain editable, and which artists to invite to make documentation.

WHY

Open Sauce was an experiment with the potential of anti-copyright ideas to address gender and sexuality. The assertion of the 'Copyleft' movement, that all creative works are remixes of those that came before, parallels feminist and post-structuralist conceptions of the self as constructed by the social environment - and yet Copyleft discourse remains mostly confined to a tech-oriented, predominantly male scene.

Open Sauce invites remixing of a sexist, heteronormative artefact (the romance novel) to facilitate its subversion, and invite contemplation of the extent to which our sexual beliefs and fantasies are a borrowed pastiche. This process blurs the boundaries between individuals, and between 'public' & 'private' thoughts, in the feminsit tradition of insisting on the erotic realm as a political one. It also offers an alternative to dominant feminist approaches to pornography which favour censorship, neglecting to envision a more positive, participatory and playful sexual culture.