The performer sits with pen in hand. He empties the contents of the pen onto a sheet of paper, this action lasts for five hours and results in the slow but systematic covering of the page with the black ink. After the pen is emptied he writes about the process with the empty pen.

In Writing version 3 the performer removes the possibility of communication by emptying the pen of ink, and also by slowly disabling the surface for inscription through covering the page with ink. The sheet of paper, as place to relay information, is transformed into an object of lost potential as all available space for inscription is utilised. The work is displayed as a dual screen installation with the screens located back to back. The ink marked paper and empty pen are also displayed. The material that possesses the capacity to inform also contains the possibility to silence or prevent expression.

Writing version 3 simultaneously offers and removes the voice of the subject from potential communication and does so publicly (in view of the camera) yet ambiguously. The manipulation of the platform for information delivery is clearly visible to the spectator whilst the potentially more engaging human content (what the performer is writing) is obscured. The spectator, in order to glimpse the ‘voice’ of the subject /performer, must decipher the path of the pen or attempt to distinguish the embossed marks, which are sometimes visible, enabling a glimpse of a word. Yet to view with such vigilance is not what we are conditioned for when it comes to watching the screen.

The screen provides packages, things that are easily consumed, and offers information in a certain format: news, entertainment, sport. There is limited depth obtainable from the screen. Whether a photograph or a television, the screens used to impart information are reductive technologies masquerading as revealing technologies. The camera that purports to expose is also bound to omit for “to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (Sontag, 2003, p. 46).

The catch cries of the 24 hr news stations and their mandate of global, “live as it happens” coverage became the source for critiquing the way video is used to construct easily consumed stories. Susan D Moeller, in her book Compassion Fatigue describes television as “an instrument of simplicity" and argues in regards to news that it is “essentially a headline service” (Moeller, 1999, p. 29).
The third version of Writing plays with concerns about the reductive as revelatory.