Craig Dongoski's joint drawing

Dear Helgi,

This is a fascinating idea.  Let me share your note, as your other insights, with my colleague David Morris, the philosopher with whom I've been pursuing the memory+place+identity work.

I think it's a very interesting experiment, to jointly hold pen in the scenario that you describe.  It's a stronger version of a very interesting exercise that my friend artist Craig Dongoski has done with students and fellow painter / print-maker artists.   He has two people sit in chairs facing each other, their knees almost touching.  A wooden board covered by a 1x1 m piece of drawing paper covers their laps.  They each have a pen.

He asks them to look always into each other's eyes.   After people get over their giggles and quiet, he walks around and touches them on their shoulders to start them drawing.   They are not to look at what they draw, only at their partner's eyes, face.

He puts a contact microphone under the wooden board, and runs the sound into software programs (like Logic or Live) through which he processes the sound in realtime, and plays back through loudspeakers.

They do this, without speaking, for 45 minutes to an hour or more, twice a week for a semester. 
He pins their drawings up on the wall.

It is interesting to see how at the beginning of the term, it looks like two independent drawing people, but after a few weeks, every pair begins to form a single style, as if the drawings are drawn by a single person, with a particular style.

Thank you so much for sharing your idea with us.  I'll post it to our research blogs so we can discuss it along with other techniques.

Warm regards,
Xin Wei