Who knows what the broken telephone game is? You know, it’s the one where a group of folks sit in a circle and one person whispers a word into the ear of the person on their left (or right, depending on the direction you choose to progress), then that person whispers what they think they heard to the next, and so on, and so on, until it gets back around to the first person. Invariably, the word said at the end has changed from the original. (All the drawings are at the end of this post, in the order they were drawn, starting with my original drawing and progressing through my classmates versions of what they saw)
Well, imagine trying to do this with drawing. Each of us (we are 16 students in total) was to draw a simple sketch on a small piece of paper. The sketch was to show a figure interacting with an animal or thing, in a space. Once drawn, we were to turn it over and write our name and #1 on the back, then hand it to the person on our left.
That person was given a a short period of time to look at the drawing then turn it over and draw it from memory. Then they were to turn it over and write the name of the person they got it from on the back with #2… we kept drawing and passing along drawings in this fashion in decreasing amounts of time to view the source from our neighbour (on the right in this case), before ourselves turning them over and writing the name of the source drawing with another number on the back… Not confused yet? Well, we managed to do this for 16 drawings each, staring from a 90 second viewing down to a 1 second viewing.
What follows are the progression of drawings started with my original drawing. needless to say, we had lots of laughs seeing the changes in some of my classmates drawings and they revealed a lot more about how we perceive each other than some of us wanted. I invite you to speculate on how the changes may have come about with my drawing.
