"deep listening"

Oliveros guides us along her path of discovering the key of collaborations. As a means of finding new outlets for creativity and utilizing reception and criticism positively to improve upon the strength and tact of our art-making.

"Whenever you look at an image, there's a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply create a sense of order. The end-product of this palimpsest of perception is a composite of all the thoughts and actions you sift through over the last several micro-seconds; a soundbite reflection"

How interesting to follow the thought process that is taken when our eyes, our ears, our brains are presented with the scenes and schemes of the imagery we are given. Whether it evokes a sensation, sells a product, or simply shows us something in a way we may not have considered looking at it before, there is always a trail of afterthought left to ponder upon if you care to indulge.

"Boundaries between categories.. are dissolving. Musicians with their phenomenal skills are listening to one another and making music together as never before by creating new sound oriented languages. In this way musicians of different cultural backgrounds can play together."

Collaboration and creative feedback create a healthy environment for an artist to build off of. It is important to hear what kind of ideas your work generates, what is the reaction from each individual- each different background guiding the interpretations, and compare that to where the work's message originally began. To watch the idea you were trying to convey begin to bend and change as you see how it affects another, gaining as much from an outside view as from your own. I am constantly trying to get a response from people of varying discipline, mostly to realize how art affects people of all types, not just my art-making peers and mentors, and how the 'art' we each make can be so telltale to how we read the art, and world, around us.

"Though our respective languages were vastly different we managed through listening to each other to collaborate by sharing our discoveries"

Presently "home" to me consists of three female artists and myself. Each holds her main artistic concentrations in different areas; photography and sculpture, music and graphic arts, fibers and painting, film production and metal-smithing. The variety leads us to very healthy feedback. Each brings an altered perspective to the table, creating new ways of looking at one's own work simply by feeding it through another set of eyes and mind and taking the reaction in turn.