Telepathic Pet Drawing Sessions

Lauren von Gogh and Robyn Cook are the (founding) members of the Sober & Lonely Institute of Contemporary Art (SLICA). They have facilitated telepathic sessions since 2008 and SLICA was officially founded as an institute of 1 April 2011. Von Gogh facilitated Telepathic Pet Drawing Sessions at Hackerspaces Soup in 2012, which was based on the scientific investigations of Karl Krall. Krall was a German horse trainer from the early 19th Century, who raised a gifted horse named Muhamed. Krall claimed Muhamed was able to perform mathematical calculations, to recognize musical harmony and dissonance, and, eventually, to communicate through thought with his trainers. For Telepathic Pet Drawing Sessions von Gogh channeled the unspoken thoughts of pets into watercolour abstractions. Participants with pets were invited to make a fifteen-minute appointment via Van Gogh’s advertised email, and to bring photos of videos of their pets if their pet was not able to be in attendance. Another work made in 2012 with Sober and Loney is called For Karl Krall: A Quantifiable Experiment in Telepathic Thought Transferance. In 2011 Sober and Lonely created Oh My Oh My: from the annals of a great telepathic affair, inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction, where he explores precognitive and recognitive thought through ‘telepathic butterflies’. They worked with eighteen artists from around the world over four-month period to create dialogue and experiment around notions of thought transference, serendipity and telepathy. Sober and Lonely also run a synchronized running group and their projects are less object-based and more about the ‘artistic proposition’ of inter-human relations.