The note started before it sounded.

A trickle of energy drawn by the magnetism of mouth to mouth.  It extended from body through the brass or silver necks, around the curves of maple bodies, building and stretching until everyone filled the room.  Like the atoms of air and metal and flesh (the carbons and hydrogens, the sugars and salts), the people became unaware of the differences between star and air and flesh as the energy colored over the lines of the words in the definition - just shapes that spoke no more seeing no purpose to be the finger when the finger already touched the small moon tab to produce something more profound.

And the energy broke off and cracked from the neck, static lightning forming and felt as each bond ripped, vibrated, ran to the stars where they took with them some small part of us, condensed like particles awaiting another bigbang leaving only the atoms of room and skin spinning

5/4.

In a dialog, what is ultimately communicated reflects only part of the thinking involved; the scope of each reply depends on the medium through which it is presented, be it image, writing or song.  It is my intention to study the communicative process across mediums and subjects, specifically by forming dialogues between painting and poetry.  Visual communication is particularly adapted to respond to the compressed words in a poem that, when read, unfold into many levels of thought.  Through paintings, a visual artist can quickly reconstruct broad experiences using signs that are not associated with a specific meaning.  A square, for instance, can represent either containment because it is an enclosed shape, a house because the lines read on ceiling, floor and walls, or stability because horizontal lines indicate a constant condition.  Through the emotional impact of color and rhythm, the painting's immediate impact becomes infinitely more complex.  As my project demonstrates, what the poet takes from visual communication is unpredictable, sensitive to his individual experience. By interrelating the visual and the literary, it offers a wide view of the overall communicative landscape. 

While paintings produce an immediate, pre-logical effect through archetypal associations, mythic forms and instinctive processes, writing necessitates an initial level of decoding to be understood.  Its symbols are deciphered on the basis of agreed upon structures, axiomatic forms and the logic of grammar.  Thus, the impressions caused by visuals are instantaneous; decoding comes later.  While poetry awaits interpretation, its elemental syntax relies upon the recognition of conventional symbols combined meaningfully./

In an effort to better understand te relationship between the immediacy of the visual with the programmed element of the written word, Elle Chimiak (a writer) and I (a painter) began a conversation between our works.  We did not simply pair our works, but rather engaged in a dialogic process where the product of one became the raw materials for the other. 
We set the following rules:
1)  She writes a poem
2)  I respond with a painting based on the poem
3)  She revises her writing based on the painting
4)  The process continues.

Under normal circumstances, people set out to create a work with an overarching intent - the process or route they take to get there might be circuitous or unforseen, but the initial seed leads to a conclusion, result or product.  By working in collaborative dialogue, we suspend the notion of completion by forcing a perpetual response between creators.  In this way -- by forcing an emphasis on the conversational process rather than the individual, discrete result-- the role of the visual and the literary in communication can be better assessed.

Of course, one can envision a collaborative dialog between any two creators working in any two mediums -- a musicain and a poet, or a painter and a sculptor.  But i am specifically interested in the visual-to-verbal exchange.  Of these expressions, painting and writing are the most functionally polarized.  As with painting, music and sculpture depend on their physical attributes to produce a response.  The frequency at which pressure changes in the air, the wavelengths of tlight reflected from the canvas, the thickness of the paint and the countours in clay or stone, these are the means through which painting and the other aforementioned mediums transmit an impression.  Writing, however, is not reliant on its physical form to affect the viewer; its symbols are fundamentally abstract.  Although the jagged or sinuous shape of certain letters, or the pleasing regular arrangment of lines, might produce a feeling in the audience, it is what the signs represent -- and the mental process of decoding -- that triggers a response and allows for further interpretation.