Collaboration 1  |
“He sat at the machine and stared, looking for its ghost.”Date: 20 May 2009 Our first written collaboration begins in a narrative form roughly poking fun at the collective itself and our own complicated, deeply personal relationships with computers. It eventually breaks down into loose, poetic expressions whose meaning depends more upon proximity than syntax. |
Collaboration 2  |
“Ok, listen… I have recurring dreams.”Date: 27 May 2009 This week we start with a simple theme: recurring dreams. Several vivid images immediately come forward (broken teeth, voyeurism, apocalypse); however, the leitmotif of John the Baptist provides a surprising thread linking much of the text together, just as his figure could be said to graft Christian onto Judaic traditions. |
| Collaboration 3  |
“I am writing to you from an underground bunker somewhere in the heart of winter.”Date: 11 June 2009 Our third collaboration begins with the premise of appropriating images, thus allowing their proximity to spark correspondences. As a result, the page sometimes resembles a Google image search, with results clustering into tables. At other times, however, moments of disruption occur that demonstrate how an sign's meaning is deeply dependent upon its context. |
Collaboration 4  |
"The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them the imperfect Man; but their testimony is suspect”Date: 17 June 2009 We choose a rigorous and precarious method of composition: the subtractive method. Rather than building our text, we begin with a translation of Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" and remove or reposition its words. We quickly find this technique very overwhelming, much like Borges' fictional library, but through painstaking reconfiguration of language -- mining for evocative moments -- the passage yields a strange commentary on authority and memory. The process leaves a mass of detritus to be discarded. |
Collaboration 5 |
"I am a fire, ten stories deep.”Date: 24 June 2009 Our latest collaboration is intimate but straightforward, a quiet conversation in visual and written language. A YouTube video of (freshly deceased) Michael Jackson performing "Man in the Mirror" evokes an inquiry into our culture's notions of beauty, sexual relations, violence, and power. The form becomes a series of captioned images, whose footnotes elucidate, dramatize, and jest. |
Collaboration 6  |
"not born of the earth, but still here”Date: 20 August 2009 After a month-long hiatus due to everyone in the collective simultaneously needing to relocate, we decide to focus on locations for our next collaboration. We utilize a new technology, the "presentation" Google Docs application, to record and explicate individual sites. Many of the sites, such as a suspended marble, are purely metaphorical. Others, evoked through personal photographs, have a skewed literalness. Taken as a whole, the panes seem to loosely articulate a sense of feeling both at home in the world and alienated from it. |
Collaboration 7 
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"FAMILY"Date: 31 August 2009 Large topic, lengthy collaboration; family means something uniquely difficult for each artist. Yet through the course of our process, certain similarities emerge: a sense of alienation from reproduction, a tiredness over familiar discourse, cynicism towards "traditional" values, and a certain terror of responsibility. Nevertheless, as we shuffle and refine our appropriated signs, their inadequate aping gestures to a shared value of something deeply worthwhile. |
Collaboration 8 
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"Plagiarism (Thanks Mom and Dad)"Date: 3 September 2009 Given the nature of our collaboration, it inevitably addresses plagiarism, the misrepresentation of another person's work as one's own. Our exploration centers around the nature of "representation" and challenges the notion that attribution is the legitimate relationship between an appropriation and its source. Because attribution makes the re-figuring of a cultural artifact (image) impossible, the freedom to express an image's artistic meaning requires that we trespass it in socially problematic ways; that tension itself is the interest of our work. |
Collaboration 9  |
"My Sacred Heart"Date: 10 September 2009 The rhythmic beating of a heart characterizes this collaboration, which was as small and intimate as a darkened chest cavity. And yet it was constructed over vast distances. |
Collaboration 10 |
"Cat Stroke"
Date: 8 October 2009 Our attempt to write about catastrophe quickly devolved (evolved?) into a quick-punning, freewheeling play in three "starts." Starring Henry Waddleswort and Suzie Twist, who may or may not be desperately in love. Special appearances by the old guy and chorus. |
Collaboration 11  |
"Regressful Condolences"
Date: 15 October 2009 The difficulties of communication are well documented by philosophers and second graders alike. Our attempt at a letter of condolence spirals into itself in a rash of permutations that leave meaning dependent upon emotion for a toehold. |
Collaboration 12  |
"The Beautiful Surgeon"
Date: 11 February 2010 A freak outage left us without the ability to chat about our project before / during its progress, so this week's collaboration was a truly stream-of-consciousness affair. We were left guessing at our own intentions, snipping and binding with more delicacy than is usual. The resultant is a playful branching of narrative away from any story. |