Erla Haraldsdottir and Daniela Franco met at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997 and have kept in touch since then. Last Fall they started working on a collaboration. "My Life with John" is the result of their exchange and process.

Being as far apart as they could possibly be (Franco living in Mexico and Haraldsdottir in Iceland) they integrated their distance as a part of the piece. Combining the idea of having someone else decide the outcome of your piece, as Erla has done in previous work, with the idea of creating through constrains and restrictions -- as present in most of Daniela's body of work, they came up with a system trough which they exchange "assignments" periodically.

As one gave the other a list of tasks to perform and document, the other did so by interpreting and documenting the assignment as she pleased. The assignments were random and variated.   For example, one might have received an assignment to repeat the tone "A" 23 times and make a rythm out of it, write and send a letter (personifying a teenager) to the Latin American singer Chayanne, find a street address number 6, make a creature that was a mixture of an alien and an angel, or else to pay someone to translate the word "news" in Spanish.

Behind each list of assignments was a system that each artist followed and that the other was not aware of.   Erla's tasks were based on her "All Time Favorite Songs" while Daniela's were based on the listings from expired American TV Guides.

The results of their exchanges are presented in My Life with John, including video, still images, text and sound. The show is formed by documentation of the actual pieces (i.e. the performance of the task).

Incidently, Haraldsdottir and Franco   hadn't seen each other since the first time they met. They planned and developed the entire piece through e-mail and met   finally at the Almalöv opening.