ART BY TRANSLATION

The Tyranny of Distance

  • Sharon Kulik, Long Distance Communication, 1972, at TALM-Angers, November 2018

  • Sharon Kulik, Long Distance Communication, 1972, at TALM-Angers, November 2018

  • Sharon Kulik, Long Distance Communication, 1972, at FLAX@ Tin Flats, November 2018

  • Sharon Kulik, Long Distance Communication, 1972, at FLAX@ Tin Flats, November 2018

Sharon Kulik, Long Distance Communication, 1972
Poster, video transmission, reports of experience

"Sébastien: This idea of telepathy is expanded more explicitly in the work of Sharon Kulik in her piece called Long Distance Communication, which she first did in the early seventies. So for this work there is one person who is asleep in Angers, called the receiver, and in Los Angeles, there is one person who is awake, who is called the transmitter. The transmitter has an image of the receiver in front of her, and this image acts as a stimulus to project images to them. So she is telepathically sending images, thoughts, and sounds from LA to Angers, and then writing down what she sent. The next morning the receiver also will record what he remembers from his dreams. The results of this experiment, whatever they will be, will develop throughout the course of the exhibition.

Anna: When we decided to recreate this work we made a choice that there would be a previous relationship between the sender of the information and the receiver. So the Receiver in Angers is one of the participants of Art by Translation, Jasmin Blasco, an artist who is usually based in LA, and therefore has a pre-existing connection to the transmitter.

Maud: But in any case this work offers us a chance to try out telepathy for ourselves, and then we will see how successful it could be. And actually I think as we start to see what has been transmitted and what is received, as a public we will naturally start to see significance and connections between these messages, in much the same way we interpret and deduce meaning from a work of art, which also demands leaps, inferences, and faith.

Anna: It’s true people will believe many things if they are set in the right context."

This text is an excerpt from the performance The Infiltration by Joshua Schwebel whose project was to infiltrate the curators’ position in the exhibition. Read more