Journey to the West is an interactive networked art project developed in collaboration with Roy Ascott for the reactivation of La Plissure du Texte (originally created in 1984 for the exhibition Electra at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) as part of the Shanghai Biennale 2012–2013. This reimagined version revisits and extends Ascott’s pioneering work in telematic art and distributed creativity, translating its conceptual framework into a contemporary digital context.
La Plissure du Texte (literally “The Pleating of the Text”) was one of the earliest large-scale experiments in online collaborative authorship, conducted through the ARTEX network, a pre-internet communication system connecting peers across several countries. In that project, participants from eleven cities collectively authored a fairytale in real time, each adopting a mythical role such as Prince, Princess, Magician, or Dragon. The work proposed a radical rethinking of authorship, narrative, and the role of the artist, emphasizing collective intelligence, remote collaboration, and the merging of mythic imagination with telecommunication technologies.
The Journey to the West builds on this legacy, engaging fifty participants from diverse locations in a real-time networked conversation through an online custom-built chat platform. Each assumes a mythical character from various cultural traditions, including Greek, English, and Chinese mythologies, and contributes to a collective narrative inspired by Journey to the West, one of the most celebrated works in Chinese classical literature. Through this distributed and improvisational exchange, a layered, polyphonic narrative emerges, a fusion of voices and archetypes that reflects the multiplicity of global mythological traditions. The text generated by participants is visualized through custom software, translating the live conversation into dynamic visual forms projected in real time at the Power Station of Art during the Shanghai Biennale. Viewers can navigate the virtual environment, exploring the evolving story-space and observing the interplay of characters and texts. Additionally, 3D variations of the narrative were created, offering an expanded mode of engagement through spatial navigation and the use of a 3D controller.
By reactivating La Plissure du Texte within the technological context of twenty-first-century China, Journey to the West both honors and reinterprets Ascott’s exploration of telematic art, proposing a renewed vision of distributed authorship and intercultural exchange that bridges historical, linguistic, and mythological strands through the collective imagination of a globally connected community.