Telepathic Drawing Session

“I’d say I’m transmitting it. If someone picks it up, then that’s communication. Someone might pick it up a thousand years from now. Someone might pick it up five minutes before I’ve thought about it. You see, because that sort of transcends time and space, and these things sort of exist for all time, so to speak.”  - Robert Barry , 1969

Telepathic Drawing Session is a modest (if not largely invisible) performance project that links experiments in extra-sensory perception with conceptual art precedents to create a DIY drawing laboratory that spans 1,000 kilometres. In an attempt to overcome the pesky distance that so often separates Canadian collaborators, Telepathic Drawing Session places the simple technologies of telepathy and radio in the service of a complex plan to bring three artists together from Montreal and Sackville for two hours of drawing pleasure. With a nod to Robert Barry's telepathy works and Ted Serios’ experiments in photographie de la pensée, the project employs telepathic communication to generate images between remote individuals. Telepathic Drawing Session proposes a new model for a thoughtful, collaborative art practice that can be utilized by artists anywhere, anytime.

For this pilot project, staged in Montréal’s artist-run space Articule, an artist sender (Donna Akrey) executes a simple composition in a drawing booth on Articule’s premises. She telepathically transmits the details of her composition to an artist receiver (Leah Garnett) who is stationed in Sackville, New Brunswick, nearly a thousand kilometers away. Akrey’s thought transmissions are remotely but instantaneously received and then re-drawn by Garnett during her live radio talk show, “Drawing on Air.” Garnett’s spoken instructions, broadcast for a public audience of drawers to follow, are meticulously carried out by a third collaborator (Jon Knowles) who listens to a live stream of “Drawing on Air” through headphones while occupying his own isolated drawing booth directly adjacent to Akrey in the Articule gallery. Although physically separated from Akrey, Knowles nonetheless “copies” his neighbour’s drawings that have been telepathically sent to Sackville and circulated back to him in Montreal. The entire exercise is repeated six more times within a two hour performance.

While Akrey draws and thinks, Garnett receives and speaks, and Knowles listens and draws. Garnett acts as the remote receiver and transmitter, the telepathic apex of the triangle joining the drawings of two people blind to each other’s hand but exposed to each other’s mind. At Articule on March 25th, 2010, the performance was staged live and the resulting pairs of “sent” and “re-received” drawings publicly exhibited for two days alongside the recorded version of Garnett’s “Drawing on Air” show during which the three telepathic collaborators had collectively created their graphic marks.