A participatory project in which Rachel Cohen invites gallery visitors and other volunteers to copy her drawings. Each copy is made from the last copy as in the game ‘Chinese whispers’, so accidental mutations are exaggerated until the drawing is completely transformed from the original.
In a simple transmission chain a drawing of a familiar object invariably becomes indeterminate after a number of iterations. Titles added by drawers or by later participants suggest readings for the ambiguous images generated - see crane-fly and espacos do desenho residency
Another version allows for evolution by natural selection as participants are able to choose one of several drawings to copy - see natural selection. For the darwinian big draw at De la Warr Pavilion hundreds of children and adults evolved populations of drawings on 3 different ‘islands’ to see if drawing materials would have an effect.
In collaboration with scientists Rachel Cohen has used the Chinese whisper process to explore issues in cognitive and evolutionary psychology. Most recently Myths Morphs and Memes, is an ongoing series of evening events devised with psychologist Dr Julie Coultas where adults meet and take part in both games and experiments about cultural transmission.
In 2007 sets of Chinese whispers drawings were used as stimuli for experiments on object recognition with cognitive psychologist Dr Ben Dyson - art and psychology. A co-written paper was published in February 2010 in the cognitive psychology journal Perception. Cohen has made a series of animations entitled translations based on material from this study.
In 2006 an experiment tested the ability of human perception compared with a computer algorithm to recognise likeness and match pairs of drawings - see art and computer science
animation made from a sequence of chinese whisper drawings 2005
chinese whispers