Retyping On the Road is not only a remarkable performance — of endurance, concentration, and apprenticeship — it is also a deadpan experiment in textual literary criticism. Kerouac’s original typescript was oriented toward the writer: a jury-rigged roll of sheets taped together to give the illusion of continuous textual flow (whereas a true “scroll,” properly speaking, would allow one to move forward and backward, and thus would have been in the service of a reader). Morris’ practice collapses reader and writer, reorienting Kerouac’s typescript to the digital, discontinuous unit of the published codex page. In doing so, Morris both inverts Kerouac’s style of production — pecking slowly and methodically  where his predecessor sped along at a reputed one-hundred-words-per-benzedrine-fuelled-minute — and he simultaneously fulfi lls its legend. The annotated details of Kerouac’s typescript belie the Beat ideology of unconstrained spontaneity and improvisation; it is pockmarked with revisions and edits and polishing. Morris, on the other hand, hews to the adage “first thought, best thought”with an unflinching allegiance. A constrained and unexpressive homage to the era that heralded unconstrained and improvisatory expressionism, Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head showcases the critical power of the extended techniques of conceptually rigorous “uncreative writing.” In the process it reclaims Truman Capote’s Parthian shot as a point of pride: “it isn’t writing at all — it’s typing.” And type — as Kerouac used the word in On the Road — is all about genre.  Professor Craig Dworkin, University of Utah

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Simon Morris (b.1968) is a conceptual writer and teacher. He understands his role as an artist is to create a theoretical space that others feel comfortable working in and to erase his own ego in order to stimulate desire in others. Morris works to create a space of transference where linking and connecting can take place – a shared space of encounter wherein non-meaning allows the reader to construct their own meaning – and has engaged extensively with models of collaboration, digital technologies, performance writing, psychoanalysis and art history, though he describes his engagement with all such areas as being “poetic rather than logical.”    His solo exhibitions include presentations at The Freud Museum (London, 2005) and The Telephone Repeater Station (Catterick, 2003). He participated in ‘The First Festival of Media and Electronic Art’ (Rio de Janeiro, 2005) and EAST International (Norwich, 2005), plus numerous other group exhibitions internationally, including shows at The VOX Centre for Contemporary Image (Montreal, 2009), Art Metropole (Toronto, 2004) and Printed Matter, Inc. (New York, 2002). He is the author of numerous experimental books, including bibliomania (1998); interpretation [vol. I & II] (2002); The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003); and Re-Writing Freud (2005). He is an occasional curator and a regular lecturer on contemporary art, and also directed the documentary films sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith (2007) and making nothing happen: Pavel Büchler (2010).

information as material was established by the English artist Simon Morris in 2002. Based in York (UK), iam operates as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. The imprint’s activities involve publishing, exhibiting, curating, web-based projects, and  invited lectures. iam’s editorial team is Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and Nick Thurston. information as material have been invited to be writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London from 2011-2012.