COLLABORATION

Subject: texts, baby!

here you go, vera. both files are in simple text. transcribing text seems a lot like sewing little bugs or sequins. no wonder we get along so well.

shelley

Yeah. Well, I definitely want it indexed.

And then be able to create a table of contents ahm, if I can just take your discs and work from your hard copies. Where you've got things outlined then I can move things around page to page to page.

I brought a disc but I'm not finished typing.

Because I can do this stuff for you and then what would be really nice is I can take this text index that you're creating and that's constantly evolving and put it on the web also.

Oh, with the table of contents?

Yeah, so people can go, "authorship" and see all these quotes.

They can? See all this on the web?

Yeah, so I could put, ...if I did it I could do it with the intention of two modes of production, one on paper and one that goes on the web.

Oh, that's wonderful!

That would be beautiful.

The words sound ordinary and sometimes redundant when you're talking but when you take out these bites from it and read them, they're absolutely wonderful.

An amateur painter from a rural area who has been isolated from the art world. All of a sudden she has a chance to speak about her work.

Oh, I think that's great.

When she wrote a piece for the brochure she used my words from a transcription. and her own words in between kind of reminiscing about me. My writing is a little more of a description. She didn't want to go in that direction so she wrote a more personsal text for the brochure.

Yeah, picking up the beginning middle and end sort of homage to William S. Burroughs cut up method. I like that.

Did you go and see that show in Edmonton?

No I didn't did you?

Yeah, it was fabulous. It was a survey show about Bryon Gysin.

Yeah.

He collaborated with Burroughs on quite a number of things.

I really enjoyed editing the web site with you. We each had our own copies in front of us. I could pull up the page and see what you were talking about.

Say that again.

That seems to me why we have computers. We can communicate visually. Then we have another layer of understanding.

Curators could really use this if the artists had access to the technology. The work could be pulled up on the screen.

I had a student in first year that digitized paintings. He got the idea from the squares they used in colour theory exercises. So he took a Lismer landscape and ...

It was an original idea for him. He squared off the painting and then combined pairs of adjacent colours to get the gradation between two sections.

Oh, that's nice.

And it came out so that when you viewed it from about 40 feet away the whole landscape came into focus. It was the way he crossed the colours. .

You could invite him to do one for you.

Now, that's an idea.

Certainly.

This is great because I couldn't think of what to photograph for a publicity image. I though if we just do the landscape people would misunderstand.

Right.

So if we jazz it up a little bit.

Sure. We can emphasize the crack. You see what I can do is I'll cut around this image so we can have it pop out--with maybe a drop shadow underneath so that people can see that it's quite broken.

Yeah.

And really go in here and emphasize this.

Sure.

So you'll be making me five signs that have writing on them. The writing on some of them will probably be engraved and on others screened. Like if I go to several layers like the CRAPS sign over there......Like if I decide to illuminate two layers I'll have screened writing over that one.

O.K.

I don't mind if the technology is a bit different in each of the five.

So maybe for that reason this one is best left just as it is. I'll end up with hundreds of these and I'm going to be cataloguing them. It's going out on the internet for people to copy and send in and ah. And there'll be other versions like already several people are making copies. I provided them with either a snapshot or a floppy to take home to make their copies so ...ah, the idea is that we're going to have a variety here and a huge number of unknowns .

Yeah.

I won't know what's coming in

Yeah.

These are only 100 dpi. We fitted one image on to each floppy. I wanted the convenience of passing around the floppies for others to make their versions of the landscape. Besides I don't have a large storage unit like EZ drive. Every time I get another copy there'll be an entry on a data sheet. We could end up with hundreds of them and this log will be in front as a witness to incoming copies.

Because the people who have done the copies are sort of identifying more with amateur painting it would be interesting to sort of talk with some sort of amateur painting groups. You knoW, but there are numerous sorts of hobby groups. But I don't know how one would involve them.

The only thought that came to mind was to request a brief audience with a couple of them. I can put them in my car and set them up and generate some interest there, and tell them they're going to be in a show, and get some input. So there must be quite a few places like that in the city.

Yeah, yeah, there are.

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