Artist collaboratives can be a tricky business, but try doing it with neither the internet or even a computer. Years ago I collaborated with the brilliant, contemporary composer Henry Brant on a piece called "Inside Track", which was played at the Holland Festival. My part in it was that I made slides of dozens of paintings on paper that were displayed on four projectors, which were "played" by two percussionists. Since the piece was performed in Holland, I never got to see it.Let's break down that last sentence. "I made dozens of slides." We are talking about real slides, physical slides; slides that take a week to process in a film lab; slides made out of film and cardboard, that can't be cropped, but rather have to be taped with physical tape to block out anything you don't want the viewer to see. "The slides were 'played' on four projectors"; yes,  these were slide projectors, all mechanical, nothing electronic about them. They were noisy, had different lenses, could overheat and burn the slide. Or if you used the projection long enough, the slide just faded or turned brown. The button to forward the slides was not always reliable, nor was it easy to control the speed of the advancement.  The percussionists must have been very talented.

MK:  When you were a child did you go to museums?  Pay attention to the art in your home?

LP:   When I was very young I used to pour over my parents’ two art books. One was Fifty Centuries of Art from the Metropolitan Museum, and the other was a survey of American art. What I felt when looking through those books was that I wanted to live inside a painting. We lived just outside of New York City, and my mother took me to my first museum exhibition when I was nine or so. It was a retrospective of Turner at the Modern. I remember feeling when I walked through the rooms that I wanted to know everything about what I was seeing, but I wanted to get that information directly from the paintings. I was not one to read labels.