Postmarked messages, bicoastal devotion in elaborately coded digital sequences, long-distance phone-bill diaries. It wouldn't seem to be true, but the fervor of a long-distance affair is as genuine an emotional connection as that of live-in lovers. All relationships are manipulated by their participants' focus, depth of field shifted through the plane of vision like a camera lens, revealing only those elements chosen for exposure. It's impossible to be completely honest; every notion, action, and stuttering heartbeat can't hope to be expressed. But the singular, calculated control of distance--the complete puppetry of your character as it relates to another person, composed with a deliberate knowledge of the act of communication--now that is an interesting concept.

Collaborators, an effort uniting nine visual artists from Seattle with nine writers from New York City, proposes, both directly and peripherally, a question about the nature of "relationship," supplanting romance with a blind date in creative endeavor. Co-curated by Fionn Meade and The Stranger's own Emily Hall, and presented with Hugo House's Surveillance inquiry, the project takes as a starting point three months of interpersonal contact between nine pairs of creators, with the distinct goal not romantic fulfillment but a tangible creative end: the individual works that compose the exhibition.

On the surface, this seems like a palpable recipe: unite total strangers with a common project, challenge them with distance, let sit three months (stirring occasionally), serve genius. But as is so often the case with things that appear basic, Collaborators complicates into a thematic soup of half-thoughts, most of which are punctuated with question marks. For example: How is it possible to unite strangers, with no knowledge of one another, in a working relationship with an artistically prosperous end?

The answer is simple, if frustrating: Collaborators is simply a backward blind date, with a ticking clock. The process is a frantic, stumbling, awkward game of cat-and-mouse, whose results run the gamut of relationship successes and woes. Again, we remember this relationship is of the long-distance variety, with its calculated control--an element the show's participants confront in a variety of ways (from sharing works, personal items, and correspondence to conducting bicoastal espionage). This exchange alone gives the audience the possibility of a fascinating interplay, but the project is also burdened with the goal of specific independent creative output.

So what about the work? In keeping with the context of the show, the answer isn't simple. Collaborators is a strangely voyeuristic and at times extremely frustrating cross-section of text-heavy, seemingly unrelated works with varying degrees of success, again (surprise!) with parallels to long-distance relationships themselves. As independent works, the more ambiguous pieces--Jeff DeGolier and Scott Holden Smith's series of Polaroids and mixed media photographs, juxtaposed somewhat incongruently with a single sheet of rambling text (awash in noncommittally universal pronouns) or Toi Sennhauser and Matthea Harvey's prominently displayed installation that seems like an aggravated attack on one creator--are less immediately successful than those directly addressing the collaboration (such as Greg Lundgren and Brian Farnham's thick pile of documented correspondence sealed in Lucite with each other's unread responses) that are direct physical manifestations of artistic frustration.

With the help of the show's uniting display, Meade's own "Missive, Circuit," we're granted an ambiguous glimpse into intercepted communications from the collaboration process, which turns the exhibition into a dance of connection and further understanding--uniting initials to names on marker cards in order to stalk artistic intent.

Collaborators is as much a challenge to its viewers as to its artists. Despite a lot of compelling work (Juniper Shuey and Paul McRandle's video installation projecting text onto a thin bed of milk on the surface of a school desk, and Susan Robb's playfully explicit installation of black shrinkwrap), the bulk of Collaborators is a convoluted series of disparate miscommunications; most pieces act as two independent halves of a collaboration not entirely united. For a patient observer, however, this in itself is a captivating idea, entirely worthy of exploration. Collaborators, in a subtle way, is simply a microcosm of the universal nature of relationships: two persons, completely independent of one another, having fervent emotional involvement with one person alone--themselves.