Information on the Artists

Janet Cohen Keith Frank Jon Ippolito	...have been agreeing to disagree since their first adversarial collaboration, Casting Lots, in 1993. Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito foreground the conflict inherent in collaboration by basing each work on a particular competitive event, such as marking territory by spitting pins, targeting an opponent with projectiles, or evaluating each other's ideas for an artwork. Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito's digital work has been presented at Sandra Gering Gallery Online and at SIGGRAPH 97; in 1997 they were awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany award for their body of work. (See the Variorum of Past Projects for more information on their nondigital collaborations.) The artists live and work in New York and can be reached at cohen-frank-ippolito@three.org. Information on Ippolito's other dubious activities can be found at his home page.
. Sentences on Adversarial Collaboration	...is an artists' statement (of sorts). Given a set of 31 beginnings for sentences, each of the three participants completed the sentences independently. The version shown here is an adaptation for the World Wide Web of the original text version.
. State of the Art	...is a composite interview based on actual public conversations between curators and artists. The rhetorical strategies used by both sides are tabulated in a graph that accompanies the interview.
. Agree to Disagree Online	...charts a series of arguments, beginning with the inflammatory statement "in the future, books will be replaced by maps," in both time and space. Viewers can navigate through an individual argument by clicking one at a time on the artists' responses to each other. These responses are represented both in words and by a series of arrows that indicate agreement or disagreement in spatial terms. The more a participant agrees with a statement, the closer the arrow moves toward her or his initials. Hence, when the negotiation nears consensus, the arrow moves toward a central point equidistant from all three participants; when the negotiation becomes more divisive, the arrow moves toward the periphery. In this way, the cumulative overlay of arrows expresses the shape of the argument, while the larger-scale structure is determined by digressions from one argument to another. Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito were awarded a DNP Achievement Award for an earlier version of this project.