The Drawing Game is an ongoing collaboration with twenty-six participants. It is essentially about connectivity. Its uses the Internet as a tool to create real, tangible connections between people through the medium of drawing. It provides the opportunity for a person to sit with someone else's drawing in front of them and consider how to respond to it. This is an intimate act which embodies a certain type of responsibility; how to be truthful "knowing that what we do always alters those around us, rearranges our landscapes in ways that are difficult to predict and, sometimes, even more difficult to understand".1
The Drawing Game started with one image: a relationship diagram from a series of prints that Jana Harper made about the love between the Hindu deity Krishna and his favorite gopi Radha. Jana sent the image to each of the participants and asked them to make a drawing in response. In a way, The Drawing Game mirrors the relationship between Radha and Krishna because it touches on "the mystery in knowing someone so deeply-and yet not at all; intimacy and distance, simultaneously".2
The participants were then split into two groups. Game One includes ten members who received a drawing about every two weeks and then sent back a response. The responses were shifted in a circular rotation so that in the end each person will have received and responded to every other person resulting in 100 drawings. This group includes artists of all types and two seven-year old children. The children represent one fifth of the group and it is astounding what an effect they have had on the overall outcome.
Game Two is structured as a conversation between two people. It has three different forms of dialog: a call and response where each part of the conversation is represented sequentially by a different image; a call and response where each part of the conversation is literally layered on top of what came before it; and single responses.
- Ken Botnick speaking about The Drawing Game
- ibid
