Facetime Drawings
While I was at school in Tokyo, and my brother was at school just north of Boston, we produced the same drawing in our separate locations using video chat.
The process for producing the drawing was as follows: (1) My brother and I both chose separate, nearby objects to draw and did not tell each other what our object were. (2) I began drawing my object by marking a single line (but it could have been any shape) on my paper; (3) My brother copied that line on his own paper, and then (4) added his own line to make the drawing appear more like his own object. (5) I then copied my brother’s last line, and then (6) added another line to my drawing to make it appear like my object. (7) My brother and I continued taking turns like this until the drawing felt complete.
My other brother and I went through nearly the same process before that:
This was an iterative project that I conducted with multiple members of my family as I figured out what the best way was to cross the distance between us.
In the earliest versions of this project, we drew without reference to an object in front of us at all. I asked my brother to draw the fireplace in our home living room from memory, and our father’s face.
My Mom and I drew the view from our separate windows. In our drawings, they are combined into a new perspective, somewhere in between Tokyo and Boston.
I asked her that we mail each other the drawings so that they swapped locations, just missing the chance to be together in the same place. A few months later, after her drawing returned to the U.S. in my suitcase, I have difficulty remembering which one is hers and which is mine.
