As part of the rather lovely Songs of Imagination and Digitisation project, XPT is working with John Morgan to produce a website where we preserve an electronic version of Blake’s famous poem ‘The Tyger’.

When I first got involved with the SID project, I was asked if I had a story to tell about my personal relationship with William Blake. I was instantly taken back to a very early school memory of having to write out ‘The Tyger’ neatly in my exercise book and draw a picture to go with it.

I still think of copying and drawing as a fundamental part writing thanks to that poem. Indeed, it’s Blake’s production process that always draws me in: the engraving of his texts and drawing *backwards* on to soft metal plates, and then the associated danger of seeing his plates blunt and smudge and break, perhaps after as little as 50 impressions.

It makes the remaining original prints and pages that still exist in the world feel very personal, fragile, delicate and *endangered*. And it made me wonder what if we could make a digital version of ‘The Tyger’ that felt the same way? Each time we conjured it up on the screen we were in some way helping to wear it out?

At savethetyger.org we’re developing this concept. Each time you look at the poem it will degrade and die a little bit. The more people look at it, the more it will fade and distort until it entirely disappears.

 There will be, though, ways of saving the Tyger too. We’ll be making a direct plea to the public to copy and draw or ‘redesign’ key elements of the poem that we can use to refresh the work and combat the degrading process.

We’ll be looking, therefore, for Designers to contribute a new Title section, Writers to submit refreshed Text and Artists to draw us a new Tyger. Each time one of these three elements looks like it’s about to disappear into nothingness, we’ll replace it with something you send in. In this way, the Tyger will live on, albeit that it will morph and ‘evolve’ over time based on your contributions.

We’re aleady taking submissions of Titles, Texts and Tygers, so feel free to send us something. Full details of how to join in are in the videos.