Read-Receipt: A Performance for Receipt Printers and People

Read-Receipt Documentation from James Wilkes on Vimeo.

A performance at Static Gallery, Liverpool, 21.01.15, as part of Torque2: The Act of Reading

3 ethernet-connected receipt printers were set up in the performance space. Over the course of the performance, they were remotely triggered to print receipts, with a new text printed each time one was taken.

Read-Receipt

The texts to be printed were assembled from over 2500 years of receipts, invoices and tallies, framed to allow reading, performance and conversation. The receipt is freed from its functional straitjacket, and turned into a marker for the reciprocal relationships between reader and writer, speaker and listener. It becomes a modern equivalent of the ‘tally stick’, notched and split to make tangible the indebtedness of one to another.

receipt cropped for web

Thanks to Sam Skinner and Nathan Jones.