Skin

When I first heard about Shelly Jackson's "Skin" project I did not understand how word tattoos distributed between thousands of people would result in a book.  So many aspects make this project's end result of a book almost impossible to achieve. It would be very difficult to organize the people who were tattooed to make the story readable for anyone else than Shelly Jackson.  Then I started to think that maybe Shelly Jackson does not care about making a book, or even a story distributed among thousands of people, but instead came up with this idea as a story in itself.  Perhaps the text when put together person by person, tattoo by tattoo is meaningless and the only meaning lies in the willingness of people all over the world to be involved in a project that they have no idea what the underlying meaning is.  I think the amount of people involved in this project show that many people are so attracted to the idea of being part of something different, or even being part of a work of art, that they are willing to participate without knowing anything.  Having a word tattooed on the body for this project does not just allow a person to be a lasting part of a work or even give the person a lasting mark of Jackson's writing but allows the participant to claim originality in the project.  Each person who is tattooed with a word is a piece of an original document.  People are fascinated with original documents; song ideas scrawled on pieces of paper, the birth of a story handwritten on note paper, auctioned off and held in public view as valuable.  It is as if these original documents give the fan insight or a glimpse at the genius that created the document.  In some ways Jackson's project gives living people the chance to be a part of the praised original document, ink on a crumpled piece of paper.  However, due to the reproduction limits of the project, the people and their tattoos that make up the story are not only the original document but the only document, giving the participants even more reason to join the project. Perhaps no one joined Shelly Jackson's project for the reason of being a part of an original document, but it seems like reasonable motivation to join. 

Another interesting idea brought up in class surrounding this project is the idea of distribution. Essentially, Jackson's project once tattooed and finished is nothing but a story distributed among thousands and thousands of different people.  By distributing a work that is commonly found within hundreds of pages right next to each other, Jackson is making the distribution of not only her own book but everything in the world easier to see.  Each word in a story has been developed separately and among many different people.  As time advances words do not change but the connotations of words do, and this change in feelings surrounding each word is created through many different people, in many different places.  This development of a word shows that the meaning of each word in a book is distributed throughout the world, creating different ideas about a book over different times as well as between different places.