Culmination is a month-Long project by Kristen Althoff, Mary Ayling, Katie Hogan, Whitney Larson, & Kelly Tucker in collaboration with Caro d’Offay & Laura Gilmore running at the Fill in the Blank Gallery in Chicago, America. Its creation, its process, which here is as much the work as whatever it will produce, is being broadcast live throughout the month of January on Justin.tv and will culminate on January 30th.

We are building something. We don’t know what it is. Each week we will be given a new set of instructions on how to build this mystery object. We’re dusting off our rulers, rolling up our sleeves, and interacting with our space as we never have before. The process will become the exhibit as we flex our ability to interpret instructions and collaborate on a single vision.

The work is part of some fascinating ongoing conceptual research by Caro d’Offay called Textaport which the artist defines as follows.

Textaport is a publicly generated TELEPORTING game in which a descriptive text is made available for participants. This text has all information necessary to interpret a mystery item back into reality from any location out of free materials (those found in the participants environemnt [sic]). Working to manifest a mysterious form or painting back into its original form, Textaport offers participants and observers the experience of perceiving something familiar as unfamiliar, (as if one had amnesia) to overcome possible ideological limitations that may be cramping our views.

As you would expect the research has nods to Exquisite Corpse and the Cutup where authorship becomes a shared collaborative process. However in this latest instance of the research the use of networked forms potentially distributes that authorship globally as Art by Telephone attempted to in 1968; ironically (or perhaps not) conceived by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Below is a live feed of the work in progress in the gallery (keep in mind after 30/01/10 this will no longer be live).