The idea of the unrealised project allows for potential to continuously exist. It requires the active involvement of the viewer to be recognised and functions as a means to bring context and the process of making to the fore.
The unrealised also encases each project with a democratic import. It's difficult not to read about each of the participant's ideas without complete faith and recognition of individual intention.
A lot of talk has arisen about failure through talk of the unrealised. And that because these projects have not been carried out in more concrete or actualised terms, that the implication of failure becomes an issue.
This failure to realise is an issue. It is precisely the issue that makes each project interesting and, more importantly, the potential of each project really interesting and worth investigating. Once a work is consigned to form, it can only move in very particular places in the imagination.
A sketch, description or thought about a work presupposes finality and strives for an ideal, a desire to achieve some effect without answering all of it's own questions. It also encourages artistic and intellectual inclusion because it becomes activated and evolved through it's reading.
The process of making is activated and experienced by the one reading.
Not only this, a work's conceptual evolution seems more aesthetically apparent in the description of a work versus the finished version. A parallel can be drawn between how the construction of language is used to create building blocks of meaning and the how the description of a work constructs a finished picture in the mind.
A finished picture that appears in as many forms as there are people involved. And in this model an exchange economy exists where cultural production is collectively created.
Sam Ely and Lynn Harris
September 2004