Crosswire

CROSSWIRE was the second in a series of the SITO Synergy collaborative art projects. The timeline of the project was July 12 through September 2, 1993.

The idea of CROSSWIRE was to see what happens when you let artists scribble on each other's work. Each articipant would create a "seed" image, pass that on to the next articipant to work with. CROSSWIRE did this in a three-step process, creating a number of three-artist images.

Over 40 people signed-up to articipate in CROSSWIRE. Not quite that many actually participated.

Resultant art

Starter images (Stage 1)
Unmanipulated images that started each thread.

Manipulated images (Stage 2)
One level into it, images manipulated by one artist.

Finished images (Stage 3)
The final images, manipulated by two or more artists.

Boring rulestuff

The structure and rules of CROSSWIRE were fairly simple. To participate, you were required to enter a "starter" image and a short text description of that image. The image and description were then made available in a public-access file-library at SunSite.UNC.edu. All participants were then set free to download images from the collection of starters and add to them, cut them up, filter them and generally do what they wanted to make their own mark on the image. Those manipulations were also thrown into the pool for others to add to even more. Three times the charm, an image manipulated twice was put into a secluded "finished" pile for exhibit at project's end. Those are the images you'll find in this directory. Some folks colored outside the lines, however and took the project beyond the bounds of it's rules. Those images are easily spotted as they defy the filename conventions.

Filenames for the images are, in most cases, maps of the image's origin. Each participant had an ID consisting of a letter and a number. They would use this ID to distinguish their influence on an image. A participant's starter image was named, simply, after their ID. For example, participant "B3" would name her starter image "B3.GIF" (or "B3.JPG" depending on what filetype they submitted). If participant C2 were to manipulate B3.GIF, he would call it B3C2.GIF when he sent it back to CROSSWIRE. That follows for finalizing and image. If A1 were to finish B3C2.GIF, he would name it B3C2A1.GIF. Thus, by reading the filename of an image, you can tell who worked on it.

It should be noted that along with images, participants would send a text description of the image to be included in a public-access index. Participants would browse the index file for ideas about what to play with and to see how the project was moving along. There is also a text index of the final images.

There were no limits to what you could do with or to an image. We let the whole thing stew for 6 weeks and here you find the results. It was originally planned for a month only, but the curator kept running out of time to finalize everything.

List of articipants

Listed by [A..Z][0..9] CROSSWIRE ID, name and current SITO ID.

A0:     Richard Simon           RTS
A1:     Ed Stastny              OED
A2:     Chris Horn              PNS
A3:     Robyn Aase              RCA
A4:     Zyzzy Galore            ***
A5:     Merilynn DeCracker      ***
A6:     Kevin Brooks            ***
A7:     Mike Tressler           MYK
A8:     Bob Anderson            BAZ
A9:     Emru Townsend           MBS

B0:     Steev Hise              SMH
B1:     Neil Herzinger          ***
B2:     Dennis Wilen            ***
B3:     Patrick Tierney         ***
B4:     Kathleen Chmelewski     ***
B5:     Max Chandler            MPC
B6:     David Anjo              ANO
B7:     Craig Merriman          CAM
B8:     Count Zero              ***
B9:     Nimrod Kerrett          ZZZ

C0:     Joseph Squier           ***
C1:     Jon Schull              ***
C2:     Robert Stephens         ***
C3:     Gail Bamber             ***
C4:     Paul Goggin             ***
C5:     Simon Gibbs             ***
C6:     Christian Breiteneder   ***
C7:     Bart Veldhuizen         VEB
C8:     EJ Ford                 ***
C9:     Diane Scheaffer         ***
 
D0:     Tom Nawara              TOM
D1:     Les Sattinger           LES
D2:     Alx Ladygo              SLX
D3:     Kerry Mitchell          MIL
D4:     David Schanen           ***
D5:     James Widmark           WIJ
D6:     Bonnie Mitchell         BON
D7:     Kerry Kivisalo          KIV
D8:     Pat Simpson             ***
D9:     Kevin Goldsmith         KMG
 
E0:     Chris Lilley            ***
E1:     Dan Bornstein           FUZ 
E2:     Dan Bradley             ***

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