NOTEPAD
Matt Kenyon
Notepad (2007) is an act of protest and commemoration disguised as a stack of ordinary yellow legal pads. When the pages are magnified, each ruled line is revealed to be microprinted text enumerating the full names, dates, and locations of each Iraqi civilian death on record over the first three years of the Iraq War.
In 2010, a printed edition of one hundred notepads was covertly distributed to US representatives and senators. As a form of Trojan Horse, the effort injected transgressive data into the halls of power and put the pages into circulation around Capitol Hill. Eventually, many of these sheets will be memorialized in official archives where the names of Iraqi civilians will also find historical recognition.
Notepad is included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, NY and was the subject of Kenyon’s 2015 TED Talk, seen below.
TED Talk: Matt Kenyon A secret memorial for civilian casualties
Each piece of American government correspondence is archived in the Library of Congress, so Kenyon’s monument not only infiltrated the White House; it became part of the nation’s permanent historical record. He also presented the Notepad memorial to the politicians who led nations to war, including former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The response? “He just said, ‘Thank you,’ and had his men escort me away,” says Kenyon.
-from Karen Frances Eng’s “Art that makes you look at everything differently” on ideas.ted.com
Notepad was previously exhibited at: Media X, 1708 Gallery, Richmond Va. Beyond Boundaries, International Digital Media and Arts Association, F.U.E.L Gallery, Philadelphia. Secret, Science Gallery, Dublin, Ireland. PAPER/WORK, ROCKELMANN&, Berlin, Germany. TED Exhibition, Vancouver, Canada. Across Voices, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA), Displacements, Renmin University of China, Beijing. FILE Prix 2014, Centro Cultural FIESP, São Paulo, Brazil. ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art, Dubai, State of State of Emergency, Van Every Gallery, Belk Visual Arts Center at Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina. Re-New Digital Arts Festival, PB43, Copenhagen, Denmark .Required Reading: Printed Material as Agent of Intervention, Center for Book Arts, NYC. Iraqimemorial.org, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, alk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), New York, NY .Intimacy Issues, Reed Gallery, The University of Cincinnati. Subtexts, Multimedia Gallery, University of the Arts.