Abstract
This article describes a project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing were brought together with free improvising musicians to explore interaction in collective real-time art-making. Following a series of guided rehearsals, the students were free to choose their own strategies for interactive group projects. We discuss these strategies based on video documentation as well as the students’ written reports and discussion comments. Overall, the students gradually shifted the emphasis of their work from temporally differentiated, imitative parallelisms between drawing and music toward more conversational and socially oriented strategies as well as more global strategies of representation employing common mental images. These findings are discussed with a view to future pedagogical work incorporating music with visual art, arguing that interactive contexts not only provide understanding of the temporal, processual, and social potential of visual art, but also hold a key to the students’ exploration of their own budding artistic autonomy.
Introduction: Interart analogies and gestures
In contemporary culture, visual images are typically embedded in contexts involving other media, especially sound and language. One consequence of this is that traditional visual arts education is increasingly difficult to uphold as a self-contained enterprise, detached from the constantly shifting ways in which contacts between various media are forged around us. Paul Duncum (2004) summarizes this by stating that art education, to be relevant to contemporary social practice, needs to become multimodal by embracing interaction between communicative modes. In Duncum’s perspective, multimodal art pedagogy should focus on approaches such as media education and multiliteracy education which basically emphasize students’ interpretational skills in the face of multimodal art products. To complement such a reception-oriented approach, multimodality may also be explored in more hands-on terms by bringing processes of art-making in various art forms into contact with one another. The gradual overall shift – perhaps even a ‘paradigm shift’ (Kester, 2011: 10) – in contemporary art production toward collaborative practices should further urge us to study the connections between different art forms as they are forged in real-time artistic interaction.
In our work with college-level visual art and music students, we have applied interartistic, collaborative activities because of their suitability for acquiring improvisational experience. The importance of improvisation for collaborative success in general is well understood (Sawyer, 2007), as is the fact that successful collaborations typically involve complementarity between non-homogeneous individuals (Moran and John-Steiner, 2004). Interartistic collaboration by definition takes place between individuals with different skill sets, and such differences between participants tend to generate unexpected situations calling for improvisational solutions. Apart from providing a pathway to exploring the multimodal practices of the contemporary art world, interartistic work provides a model situation in which to practice exchanging ideas in improvisational collaboration.
Historically, connections between various art forms have often taken the form of structural analogies. In the Baroque period, for instance, painting was often compared to musical harmony by theorists in both fields to clarify notions of proportion and color (Spitzer, 2004: 137–206). In the historiography of the arts, interart analogies have traditionally focused on structural parallels in such large-scale aspects as symmetry or balance of overall design (Stechow, 1953; Thomas, 1991). Artists themselves have likewise looked to other art forms for inspiration and influence as is clear, say, from the well-documented musical influences in twentieth-century modernist painting (Maur, 1999; Vergo, 2010). A typical artist to be mentioned in these contexts would be someone like Paul Klee (1879–1940), who was fascinated by applying procedures akin to musical structuring and was often very explicit about the specific musical influences on his paintings (Düchting, 1997). Not surprisingly, Klee’s work has inspired empirical studies showing how individuals are largely capable of matching his paintings to the musical works that influenced them (Peretti, 1972; Wehner, 1966). In recent decades, the new audiovisual media have furthered the ‘musicalization of the visual arts’ (Naumann, 2011), possibly sensitizing the public to a wider range of possible relationships between the two media. Throughout these developments, a recurrent interest has remained in direct analogies – in the sonification of images and the visualization of sounds (Schneider, 2011).
In the present article, we will not be concerned with correlations between finished (and canonized) products of visual art and music, but rather with the processes of poietic interaction observed at the intersection of these two art forms. Notice, however, that taking a processual view to multimodal artistic interaction does not preclude discussion of how the two media are coordinated in terms of structural features. Such coordination could even find a relatively stable basis in such visual gestalt properties that appear to have uncontested analogies in musical sound. To invoke an influential work of music theory drawing on this idea, Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983: 39–46) state that, other things being equal, musical notes will be grouped together in auditory perception by their relative similarity in pitch and proximity in time – quite like visual figures are grouped by the similarity of their forms and their spatial proximity. Such perceptual analogies could suggest possibilities for shared understanding and coordination of artistic gestures between visual art and music.
At the same time it should be clear that, even if musical and visual formations may internally share comparable perceptual organizations in some of their parameters, this does not determine the spontaneous cross-modal associations made between the art forms. As demonstrated by the research on intuitive graphical representations of musical sounds, there is room for creativity in understanding the relationships between musical and visual gestures (see e.g. Walker, 1978). Research on children’s graphical notations of music also shows that such notations are not always differentiated in terms of capturing one or more musical parameters in their temporal unfolding. Even more often, children use global notations that represent the music in a holistic way. For instance, their ‘notation’ of heard music might consist in something like a human figure or a picture of a musical instrument that would not contain a representation of music’s temporal progression (Reybrouck et al., 2009; Verschaffel et al., 2009). This demonstrates that abstractly representing the unfolding of the musical sounds is only one way of conceptualizing the relationship between visual forms and music, and one that perhaps unduly emphasizes not only parametric differentiation, but any kind of ‘representational competency’ (Sherin, 2000) as a preferred goal.
Furthermore, it is an empirical question to what extent any imitative parallels between media are spontaneously summoned for achieving interartistic communication in situations of collective art-making. On the one hand, live interaction between art-makers representing different art forms might especially easily come to rely on gestures that through their gestalt properties become shareable across artistic media or, perhaps, on some more global parallelisms between the media (e.g. harmonizing the overall ‘mood’). One reason for pursuing such imitative relationships might be promoting social cohesion among the participants. On the other hand, it is also conceivable that interactive art-making situations might better support polyphonic, conversational, or oppositional modes of artistic production, providing outlets for individualistic expressivity. Consequently, the role of imitation in interactive multimodal art-making suggests itself as a diagnostic tool for understanding participants’ tendencies toward social cohesion and individual autonomy.
In the following, we will discuss a pedagogical project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing at the Department of Art of a large Midwestern US research university were brought together with a group of classically trained musicians, enrolled on a course in free improvisation at the School of Music of the same university. The goal of this exploratory project was to study the adult drawers’ strategies of relating their work to another artistic medium by engaging them in a series of exercises in collective improvisation with the musicians. In particular, we were interested in the emergence and role of imitative strategies in the interaction: to what extent would the interplay be organized by relying on differentiated as opposed to global relationships between the two artistic media, and how might such strategies be transformed with increasing experience of cross-artistic improvisation? Instead of simply describing the strategies deployed, our goal was to assess the personal, social, and artistic significance attached to such strategies by the participants themselves.
Method
The study consisted of five weekly two-hour sessions on consecutive weeks. The first three weeks were devoted to guided rehearsals, followed by the students’ self-designed group projects during the last two weeks. Our main interest was in the directions that the group projects would take. It was deemed necessary to precede these projects with guided rehearsal sessions which would launch the students’ thought processes on collaborative art-making, challenge their most immediate solutions, and reduce some of the stress that would otherwise potentially affect the group projects. The goal for the first week’s rehearsal was simply to introduce the students to working together. The next two rehearsals’ instructions were decided on only after each previous rehearsal, with the purpose of breaking the most obvious patterns observed in the students’ interactions. Throughout the rehearsals, both of the instructors in class (i.e. the authors of this article) refrained from giving the students any evaluative guidelines or feedback concerning the exercises.
The participants were 22 undergraduate students taking a course in beginning drawing (17 females, 5 males), with a mean age of 21.4 years (SD = 7.9), and 10 musicians taking a course on musical free improvisation (2 females, 7 males, 1 genderqueer), with a mean age of 25.6 years (SD = 5.5). Six of the musicians were graduate students and two of them undergraduate students in classical music performance. The drawers reported having an average of 7.8 years of experience in making visual art (SD = 8.5) and 5.6 years of active musical training (SD = 4.4), while the musicians, on average, had 1.4 years of experience in visual art (SD = 2.5) and 15.0 years in musical training (SD = 5.9). Half of the drawers and all musicians with one exception reported having no prior experience in improvisatory ways of making visual art (croquis drawing, action painting, etc.). Three of the musicians and twelve of the drawers reported having no previous experience of musical improvisation (prior to their present course).
Rehearsal sessions
The drawers’ initial reaction to working as a group was described by the spectators (i.e. the participants not working on the particular piece) as a combination of individual drawing styles, random shapes, generalized abstractions and related physical gestures linked to the musical rhythms. Generally, the drawers’ action was now more physical than in the previous week’s exercise, and it was noted by the spectators that the drawers’ bodily movements tended to reflect the musical sounds. Clearly, however, sharing a common space was more difficult for some of the participants than we had anticipated: words like ‘frustration’ and ‘confusion’ recurred in their written descriptions of the process. It appeared that the drawers as well as the musicians were afraid to intrude on one another’s private spaces, and therefore remained somewhat confined within their own spheres of action. A commonly expressed idea was that the drawers were looking for common ground in visual expression to receive reassurance for their drawing action.
The open-ended setting led the participants to spontaneously ponder the question concerning roles in creative group work, and in particular who should ‘lead’ and who should ‘follow’. In a concluding discussion, many of the participants expressed their confusion about this aspect. One of the drawers noted her change of roles during the session: having started out by reacting to the music and the other drawers’ gestures, she gradually learned to concentrate more on expressing her own ideas and working on creating an image. Another drawer was interested in ‘leading’ but simultaneously felt he should be ‘following’ because of his feeling of responsibility toward his group. Still another drawer mentioned that whereas she had primarily tried to connect with the musicians by following them, she had more of a ‘give-and-take relationship with the drawers’. In general, it appeared that the drawers assumed a following role with respect to the music, while their influence on the musicians was limited to confirming the existing character of the music (as in the musician comment: ‘The music reminded about the sea, and then I saw one girl drawing the same, and … I just continued to play in that image’). As noted by one of the musicians, the drawers appeared to be divided into two groups according to whether they generated ‘ideas’ (concrete images) or produced ‘reactions’ (gestural imitations of the music).
The greater part of the responses described the conductor–musician interactions by noting similarities between the drawers’ gestures and the resulting musical ones. Indeed, the participants seemed to interpret the notion of ‘conducting’ largely in terms of gestural imitation. Five of the spectators mentioned seeing ‘circles’, ‘swoops’, ‘curvy lines’, or ‘wavy lines’ correspond to ‘circular’ or ‘fluent’ music, ‘trills’, or similar physical movements such as a drummer’s hand movement on the skin of a bongo drum. Five spectators noted how ‘long’ or ‘short’ gestures corresponded to one another in drawing and music, and four found similarities between the ‘smoothness’, ‘softness’, or ‘angularity’ of visual and acoustic gestures. Given that drawing a particular kind of visual shape often requires a similar bodily movement by the drawer, many of the comments were equivocal between referring to the drawers’ bodily movements or the resulting marks on the paper.
Another structural aspect that was mentioned by several participants was the spatial height of the visual marks on the paper. In six out of nine cases, this was correlated with height in musical pitch, thus following the usual western metaphorical mapping of musical pitch. The descriptions also referred to purely temporal aspects of the drawers’ movement, with even less reference to the resulting picture than in the above examples. Not surprisingly, fast and slow drawing movements were most often correlated with the speed or tempo of the music. Of the 13 remarks mentioning some connection between drawing speed and how fast the music was, 11 were made by the spectators, however, which suggests that such superficial similarities in the physical movement were less often applied as a conscious focus of the collaboration by the active participants, being more often something that just emerged as an easily perceptible connection to an outside observer.
Despite such common strategies, the descriptions concerning a given interaction between the conductors and a musician were far from uniform. For example, five different spectators correctly matched a trumpet player with her two conductors, but their descriptions concerning the precise analogies between the performers’ gestures differed quite markedly from one another. Two of the spectators explained the collaboration using the metaphorical connection between spatial height and pitch height, whereas three of them mentioned speed or tempo as one kind of connection between the conductors and the musician, as well as some other similarity (‘long strokes’ → ‘long, deeper tones’; ‘circular shapes’ → ‘circular’ sounding music; differences in ‘pressure’ and ‘intensity’ → differences in ‘quality of sound’). Only the last mentioned observation roughly corresponded to the trumpet player’s own explanation, according to which she had matched lighter strokes of charcoal or crayon with softer sounds. While the trumpeter herself also mentioned matching a ‘smiley’ figure with music in a major key (conventionally considered to express ‘happiness’), such representationally based connections were not mentioned by any of the drawers in this whole session.
Group projects
First, some of the groups did continue exploring the imitative ‘conducting’ style exercises, but none did so without introducing further guidelines for interaction to bind the participants’ work more closely together. This can be readily seen as a corrective to what many of the participants had, in their previous week’s written responses, experienced as a ‘chaotic’ element in their performances of the conducting game. In an exercise which the participants of Group 4 agreed had been their most interesting and difficult one, it was required that two drawers working side by side would ‘try and make the same gestures, maybe even have one drawer follow the other’, each side of the picture being in turn followed by one of the two musicians (on clarinet and trombone). More of the drawers’ attention was thus drawn to their mutual visual coordination and to observing whether the increased visual coherence would also result in more unified musical textures. Group 5 went still further in coordinating the drawing–music interaction by requiring each of the drawers to pick ‘three to four basic shapes and [draw] them while the musicians picked three to four notes and attached them according to the [visual] shapes’. Here, the heightened sense of connection between the media seemed to give the drawers a sense of empowerment, as is evident from the following comment by a female drawer: This exploration was interesting because it gave the drawers control. I found that when I drew a circle, the viola would play a specific note. With the discovery I began trying to compose a piece of music, while also creating a piece of art. This was interesting because it was hard to tell whether the piece of art or the piece of music was the main focus. This exercise truly forced the artist[s] and musicians to work together for a true collaborative piece.
Second, some of the groups dropped the emphasis on temporal coordination, looking for more global ways to harmonize the overall mood or referential context of the music with that of the visual art. In Group 2, the introduction of colored paint was seen as ‘beneficial because musicians could share the same or similar feelings with each other at better level compared to the sessions without colors’. The members of Group 3 seemed to agree that their most ‘interesting’ and ‘fascinating’ exercise was one in which a violinist – as he himself put it – ‘would play an improvisation with a specific image in mind and the drawers draw whatever image they interpreted [the] improvisation to be’. In this group, everybody was ‘surprised’ to see how close the drawers could come to guessing the musician’s imagery of ‘a day in the forest’. In such exercises, then, the correspondences between music and drawing were describable in relatively static terms, using labels for the overall musical style, pictorial mood, or referential image, rather than for episodic actions or gestures.
Third, some of the groups chose to carry out their exercises in special locations that often seemed to contribute to the feeling of meaningfulness experienced in the collaborations. Group 1 (including musicians on the alto saxophone and the Indonesian metallophone gendér) performed at a campus mall, attaching the three drawers’ papers on a cylindrical billboard. The video shows how a local outdoor evangelist suddenly grabs the student’s saxophone, playing it for several minutes, and how, to passers-by, the students ‘became one of his acts’, as the gendér player later put it. In such conditions, the drawers’ attention seems to have been liberated from strict control of the drawing–music interaction toward the overall spatial and social atmosphere. A drawer wrote: The results were unexpected. The collaboration meshed with flow of people throughout the mall area and some people even began to stand by and watch. I was very influenced by the social factor and incorporated many faces into my drawing, while the other artists collaborated more abstractly. During the collaboration, I felt that my drawings took on both the tone of the social atmosphere and progression of the music.
In contrast to ‘structured, consistent and realistic’ indoor work, the outdoor situation was experienced as ‘raw, emotional and random’, but all of the group members appeared to value their experience exactly for these qualities.
One of the groups decided to integrate a male drawer with some theater background into the musician group. He would contribute by shouting out remarks such as ‘More!’ and ‘Beautiful!’ After what some spectators called an initial ‘shock’, this evoked bursts of approbative laughter, and it was later observed that the use of the human voice made the drawers ‘more responsive to the sound directly’. In this performance, both the drawers and the musicians were also split into smaller groups with predetermined reactive relations: the ‘first group of drawers controlled the musicians, the musicians controlled the second group of drawers, the next group of musicians was controlled by the drawers, and so on’. The resulting ‘interaction chain’ was evident to the spectators, and their written descriptions often took on a narrative mode, for instance by explaining the action as a succession of ‘joinings’ and ‘stoppings’. Both the expressive, even disruptive, function of the voice and the temporally progressing interactive plan of the performance thus contributed for a departure from such overall cohesion that had previously characterized the students’ work.
Apart from revealing the social potential of collective improvisation in a manner that had heretofore remained unnoticed, this performance seemed to sensitize the spectators to the active role of making choices. In a manner that might at first seem paradoxical, the stronger social aspect was accompanied by an increased awareness of the autonomous potential to work against the other art form at will: ‘it was visible how each drawing was affected by, or not affected by the music’ (our emphasis). Similar comments highlighting autonomy and contrast – absent in the previous sessions – generally made their appearance in this final session. Even the lack of changes in activity was now seen to result from voluntary artistic choice, as in this musician comment on one of the less eventful performances: ‘It could be that the drawers had a specific picture in mind when they heard the piece begin, and were sticking with that idea, and by not reacting to the changes the musicians made, the drawers were providing contrary material for the overall artistic experience.’
Another performance that was often specified as ‘successful’, ‘amazing’, or ‘favorite’, was a rerun of the image-guessing game by previous week’s Group 3. In the performance, two musicians played solo improvisations attempting to depict specific scenes that the drawers would then try to draw. For instance, a violinist chose ‘the idea of a racecar on a racetrack that ends up getting in a wreck and taken to the hospital and dying’, which he imitated in sound with ‘shifting through gears, screeching tires, and ultimately wrecking, [and] an ambulance followed by taps to signify death’. The following comment by a female drawer in the audience represents well the enthusiasm that this elicited in many of the students: The final performance was by far my favorite performance. I thought that the manner in which the musicians told a story through their instruments was absolutely amazing. As I was listening, I got a full image in my head of what the musician was trying to say, and found it to be even more interesting to see that the other drawers had drawn the same images that I had imagined in my head. I found this to be the most astounding performance because it proved that the musicians could manipulate how the drawers drew … In addition it proved that the drawers could understand the way the musicians were thinking, without any exchange of words throughout the process.
What is interesting in such reactions is that especially the visual art students’ enthusiasm was here sparked by a performance in which drawing seemed reduced to the function of providing labels for the images conveyed through music. Although two of the more experienced musicians critically noted that ‘the idea that one could conjure a visual image from a soundscape wasn’t a particularly new or creative idea’ (female, 30), and that it had ‘very narrow scope’ (male, 28), similar observations were conspicuously absent from the drawers’ comments. Their attention seemed to have been surreptitiously drawn from the qualities of the drawing or the process of interaction to the accuracy of guessing. An explanation might be gleaned from the comments of the senior member of the drawer group: ‘Overall I liked the idea because the drawers could actually draw what they thought it was instead of just drawing abstract lines that really don’t have a purpose or certain connection with the drawer.’ The students’ rediscovery of symbolic representationality might thus be seen as a reinstatement of order in which the artwork could be subjected to conceptual control. Similarly, the racing-car violinist himself noted that the group had enjoyed the performance so much ‘because for almost the entire five weeks the drawers drew only abstractly and never anything really concrete’, and the guessing game had finally allowed them to draw something concrete. Notice, however, that at no point during the course had we, as instructors, indicated that figurative drawing should be avoided. The performance thus seemed to reveal the participants’ preconceptions concerning expectations of ‘abstraction’ supposedly imposed on them by the educational context.
Discussion
The presence of music in contexts of visual art-making can challenge students to view their visual medium from new perspectives. In particular, the mere presence of a temporal artistic medium helps to draw participants’ attention to the processual aspects of their visual work. By marking the progress of time, music assumes a deictic function (Reybrouck, 2009), pointing to gestural delimitations within the simultaneously unfolding visual work as well as imbuing the resulting visual gestures with experienced meaning. Thus, music may affect the students’ subjective grasp of the syntactic and semantic significance of their own visual gestures. Music may thus increase the experienced meaningfulness of the art-making situation, whether or not one wants to view the art-making process as a product in its own right (Pesonen, 2008). In addition, the availability of these ‘in-time’ processes of meaning-making may also redirect attention to the ‘out-of-time’ characteristics of artistic signification (for the terms, see Reybrouck, 2005). Our students’ rediscovery of symbolic meaning in the last session not only assigned music a role as a source of broader imagery, but also highlighted the tension between process and product approaches to art-making. While this tension is already inherent within any art form in itself, pitting a traditionally product-oriented art form against a more process-oriented one helps to bring it into students’ focus.
Throughout this study, we avoided giving our students any normative guidelines concerning the stylistic features that should be applied in their art-making. Also, while the use of the term ‘conducting’ in the third week’s exercise may admittedly have suggested the idea that the musical gestures could somehow be directly similar to the drawing gestures, this was never given as an aesthetic ideal. Our impression was that the students were first quite spontaneously drawn to seek security through direct representational relationships between visual and musical forms, whereas attempts to create contrasts between the two media could only emerge when a level of security had been attained.
It seems clear that the presence of music as an additional stimulus initially overwhelmed some of our student drawers. In demanding the drawers’ attention, music perhaps didn’t suggest to them anything beyond its own (quite natural) abstractness. Resorting to structural parallelisms might thus be seen as a symptom of the will to understand an externally imposed abstract stimulus by establishing a regulatory rule between the two media. The experienced success of the final session’s guessing game – in which the drawers simply guessed the extramusical images that the musicians tried to convey – may have been due to the fact that the game at once gave the drawers the permission to discard their previous, relatively more academic, attempts to understand music, in favor of more global representationality. Given that even small children typically possess some strategies for hearing music as meaningful through extramusical images (e.g. different pitch registers heard in terms of different sizes of animals), this outcome indicates that our adult drawers had initially simply suppressed such global strategies of representation because of assumed expectations.
A pedagogical implication is that cross-artistic work might be usefully begun from common mental images. Taking such images as the starting point for explorations of interart relationships has the potential to imbue the art-making with direct experiential meaning, allowing inexperienced drawers quick access to working within and across artistic media. Indeed, even artistically oriented adults may have to be told that they are allowed to draw on their real-life experiences in relating their work to other art forms. If the goal is not just to understand music by drawing figures structurally parallel to it but rather to open up the relationship between the two media for constantly shifting explorations, the students may have to be told that they don’t need to apply an intellectual understanding to the musical sounds in order to relate to them artistically. This was well demonstrated by the excursion of one of our participant groups to a nearby mall. There, the ‘raw, emotional and random’ atmosphere appears to have taken the participants closer to another kind of solution to the music–drawing equation, beyond the meticulous harmonizing of the structural relationships between the media: consciously attentive co-presence in a space that imbues the art-making with meaningfulness and integrates the artistic work to the overall meaningful fabric of the outside world.
However, one could also adopt a more positive view toward the use of imitative strategies. Recent philosophical, anthropological, literary, and cognitive theory has revived the notion of imitation, seeing the human being’s pervasive tendency to imitate as a key to the essentially relational nature of being human (see e.g. Currie and Ravenscroft, 2002; Garrels, 2011). Psychologists, for instance, have shown that behavioral mimicry increases liking between interactional partners (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999) and that having a goal to affiliate with others increases unconscious mimicry (Lakin and Chartrand, 2003). If imitation is accordingly seen as the fundamental ‘social glue’ (Dijksterhuis, 2005) facilitating human interaction, our participants’ cross-artistic imitations might be taken as attempts to forge group cohesion in the most characteristic manner in which such cohesion can be achieved. Indeed, the outbreak of more individualistic strategies of art-making in our last session only seemed possible for our students when it could happen in an already established social context – against an understanding of imitative cohesion between the participants.
The spontaneous emergence of imitative relationships between the artistic media has further significance in the context of the long tradition of imitation pedagogies. As practiced since classical rhetoric, and found today for example in classes of literary composition, imitation pedagogies take their starting point in analyzing and imitating canonized models identified by the teacher (Vandenberg, 2011). The ideal of mastering the achievements of the past is also embedded in René Girard’s (2008) mimetic theory of innovation – a remarkable attempt to salvage the notion of imitation from being opposed to innovation. However, if Girard is right in his startling claim that ‘the only shortcut to innovation is imitation’ (2008: 239), this might not only be seen as a call to redeem the classical notion of imitation that did not question its models; as Girard himself notes, our present forms of mimesis easily take on a ‘parodic and derisive mode that is a far cry from the patient, pious, and single-minded imitation of the past’ (2008: 245). What our study suggests, however, is the possibility that contemporary adults are capable of spontaneously immersing themselves in respectful, non-derisive mimesis occurring in contexts of ‘innovation’. The question raised is whether a mimetic conception of innovation could also prove viable in imitative contexts that lack a centrally imposed top-down element of traditional models.
Both the visual arts and music students participating in our study seemed to be equally challenged by having to initially sacrifice their artistic autonomy to a social process. Our experiences nevertheless indicate that students may quickly learn to value the ‘connective motivation’ (Moran and John-Steiner, 2004) provided by collaborative practices, quite independently of the judged quality of the artistic products. If we allow that interpersonal communication might itself be understood as art (Baxter et al., 2012), it is conceivable that such communication could provide a robust starting point for multimodal art education in the contemporary world.