It is commonly believed that painting or composing poetry is an
    extremely solitary creative process. This is often true. And yet,
    creation is sometimes a collective process, occurring within a
    "network of influences." Such influence can be anything from
    inspiring hints, to subconscious stylistic appropriation, or 
    respondingto an existent theme.

    I believe that most artwork is generally more the
    result of a dialog than its creator consciously recognizes.
    Digital technology makes it easier than ever before for we visual
    artists to access such methods of quotation. Additionally, with the
    advent of digital image transmission technologies, it has become quite
    feasible to merge distant creative studios into a common workspace.
    
    Our project RENGA (Linked Images), is an experiment in the
    accelerating these possibilities within digital technology -- 
    and the joy of appropriating, and being appropriated from.

    The title RENGA (Linked Images) is a wordplay on RENGA d (LinkedVerse),
    a Japanese traditional poetical genre. The first ideogram,
    read REN means to link or associate. The second ideogram, 
    read GAmeans poem. A different ideogram also read GA means images.

    Through substituting GA(image) for GA (poem), we have created the
    new word RENGA(Linked Images).
    RENGA (Linked Verse) was an art form (and a game) which brought
    poets together who then composed by appending verses onto the
    previous persons' lines.  These poets played and enjoyed with the
    various techniques and ideas of connection, and association, as
    though each had a window to a passing landscape where a drama was
    unfolding, image by image. Understanding that the HAIKU developed 
    as an articulation of individual RENGA passages, it is easy to imagine 
    the richness they hold as the whole, as well as the aesthetic
    quality of each verse.
    
        Our RENGA owes a great debt to this RENGA tradition, the greatest
    of which being the idea that a work is not what necessarily belongs to
    one author, nor inviolable. The aesthetic lies between respect for the
    other's work, and free modification of its content for one's own uses.

    In the very first session between Rieko Nakamura and myself which
    started in April 1992, we were still bound by the idea that "the art
    work is the property of the artist." We were unable to erase
    information from the others' work, and the information accumulated
    and oversaturated the image.

    But we were not looking to create one final artwork, on one canvas
    with two authors. With this in mind, we began the second session in
    December 1992, with much more dynamic translation. We developed
    an entirely new variety of appropriation, sometimes going so far
    as to almost demolish the previous art work.

    Taking an image received in electronic mail, an artist would import it
    into one's painting system, deforming it, recontextualizing it within
    another image, even printing it out and physically drawing on it, to
    rescan it back in -- and other such deliberately involved processes. 
    Atone time we would find ourselves unconsciously making references
    to Botticelli, which would influence the image.
    
    We were excited by the resulting images. Each image is something
    which was at once unquestionably one's own artwork, while at the
    same time being something which could never arise from one's own
    artistic monologue.

       Cyberspace is often mentioned in terms of the gradual loss of our
    familiar senses of time and distance, but more important to me is the
    loss of this fixed physical border between ones self and others. And
    this is something which I believe is suggested in RENGA.