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 speaking with Patricia Norvell about his telepathic pieces. May 30th, 1969

Telepathic Drawing Session is a modest (if not largely invisible) project which brings together fascinations with extra-sensory perception, preoccupations with conceptual art, and a special interest in the expansiveness of Canadian geography and its scalar restraints on collaborative artistic practice. This proposal is a result of a series of explorations that have brought together research on the 1960s telepathy works of Robert Barry with Ted Serios’ parallel experiments in photographie de la pensée in order to propose a project in which telepathic communication is used to generate images between remote individuals. Telepathic Drawing Session proposes a new model for a thoughtful, collaborative art practice that strives to overcome the pesky limits of time and space—so long a perennial problem for Canadian artists hoping to work with one another across provincial boundaries without the financial assistance of travel grants, the luxury of residencies, or access to unlimited Air Miles.

For this pilot project, staged in Montréal’s artist-run space Articule, an artist sender (Donna Akrey) will execute a simple composition in a drawing “booth” on Articule’s premises. She will telepathically transmit the details of her composition to an artist receiver (Leah Garnett) who will be stationed in Sackville, New Brunswick, nearly a thousand kilometers away. Akrey’s thought transmissions will be 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, will be meticulously carried out by a third collaborator (Jon Knowles) who will be sitting in his own isolated drawing booth directly adjacent to Akrey in Articule’s space listening to a live stream of “Drawing on Air” through headphones. Although physically separated from Akrey, Knowles will nonetheless be “copying” his neighbour’s drawings that have been telepathically sent to Sackville and circulated back to him in Montreal. The entire exercise is repeated two more times within the half hour performance.

While Miss Akrey draws and thinks, Miss Garnett receives and speaks, and Mr. 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. The performance will be staged live and the resulting pairs of “sent” and “received” drawings will be publicly exhibited and accompanied by a recorded version of Garnett’s “Drawing on Air” during which the three telepathic collaborators collectively created their graphic marks.