Reflections on Strangers on a Train: Anna Pharoah I found the idea of 'Strangers on a Train' romantic, suggesting a form of idealised social interaction; utilising the potential for encounters of various ambiguous and transitory relationships, within the setting of a train. The Strangers project seemed to contain direct and indirect relevancies to my practice. My work explores the desire for encounters of an inexplicable, poetic, or uncanny perceptual experience within the context of daily life. I have executed impromptu performances on the train in the past, and instigated 'The Five Second Theatre', exhibiting solely to train passengers passing by my kitchen window. In the film, 'Strangers On A Train', once the two strangers exchange dilemmas and fantasies and enter into a deal, they take on the burden of something delicate and difficult. I wanted to give the recipient artist a delicate and difficult mission. I attempted to deliver a small and graceful cone of powder paint into the palm of the recipient artist. I thought that finding a way to preserve the cone would become their "delicate and difficult" mission. I wasn't too disgruntled however, when I learned that when the recipient received the cones of powder, they threw them into the air, creating a "cloud of colour", because I was aware that the process of creating the cones of powder in the palm of a hand, was gestural rather than reserved. From my journey to York, I inherited footage from another artist, which I found to be an intense experience, having no previous knowledge of the person, and trying to make some conclusions from something so alien. The footage was of a derelict neighbourhood of red houses. In response, I created small 2x3" booklets - one containing images of the sunrise over an area of a city-centre which has been razed to make way for commercial development. The second responded on a more candid level to the red colour of the empty houses, containing pictures of red houses and the lyrics from the Jimmy Hendrix song 'Red House'. It occurred to me that both of the pieces I had created for the project were interactive in an intimate way. The one-on-one collaborative nature of the project informed the work, creating a high degree of intimacy. Having only one audience member, albeit an anonymous stranger, meant that the work would be significant to one particular person, and therefore had a romantic and secretive quality, which seemed appropriate. I'm interested in the work of Douglas Huebler, who creates cameos of social interaction that are flawed or inconsequential, and yet exciting. I had imagined that perhaps Strangers could be comparable to this style. I expected the train journey to inform the work, imagining that the entire project would take place on the train journey from London to Newcastle, with transitory participants and the passengers as audience, like a Dada-style take on the parlour game of consequences. As it turns out the covert relationship that developed between artists, and the contemplative nature of this was a more influencing factor. I felt that with so much potential for near misses and misunderstanding, that anything that worked out well was serendipitous, and therefore the project, with it's slightly cumbersome structure, proved to be a satisfying experience. [Anna's work was "altered" by Nisha Duggal, and Anna altered Chris Croft's piece.]