The project was devised by an American artist, John Copeland. He purchased a thousand blank journals and distributed them at random. The idea was that each recipient would keep the journal for a period of two weeks, during which time they would contribute to the journal. Their contributions might be a drawing, a poem, a comment, a record of their thoughts or emotions, an account of their travels or their responses to current events, or it might be in the form of a clipping from a magazine, a collage, a snapshot of their friends or family, in fact anything at all was acceptable, there were no rules. Then the journal would be passed on to another person who would also make a contribution and pass it on, and so on, until the journal was full. Then it was to be returned to John Copeland to be ultimately included in an exhibition. During the journal's travels it would be periodically scanned and the scans uploaded to a website so that all participants could view other people's contributions and discover when and where the journal was last sighted.
When I heard about this project I immediately thought that I could do my own version. Instead of having a thousand journals, I could get just two or three and ask my friends to contribute and to get their friends to contribute. As I have such an amazing and eclectic group of friends this could yield quite interesting results.
So, if you think this would be an interesting project and you'd like to participate, email me and I'll get things started.
If you want to know more about the One Thousand Journals project or its successor, go to 1000journals.com or to 1001journals.com.
