Introduction to
An Exchange of Graphics
by Reid Wood and Karl Young


For four and a half years now, Reid Wood and I have engaged in year-long collaborations. Several other people, most extensively John Fowler and Lois Ward, have joined in for a while during one project or another. Several of these interacted with other related projects, and all of the previous ones resulted in gallery exhibitions. The first projects extended the mail art practice of passing mail back and forth, altering it in various ways with each generation. The difference between these exchanges and traditional mail art is that until this year, we conducted them by fax, and now have moved on to exchanging copy in jpeg format. During the fax project years, we set aside time on each tuesday night for our exchanges, and in the first year did three exchanges each session. This not only encouraged a great deal of spontaneity, it also lead to rapid transformations. Now we just do one exchange a week, and don't need to send our copy at a specified time. Given the smaller scale and the new medium, the earlier pages involved a slower rate of change and a greater emphasis on detail. Now, at mid year, we're moving much more rapidly. How this will work out in the second half of the year, I don't know - and that's part of the fun of projects like this.

- Karl Young


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Copyright © 1998 by Reid Wood and Karl Young.

This is a cooperative presentation of
The 6th Biennial
Kaldron On-Line and
Light and Dust Mobile Anthology of Poetry