Collisions: drawing in the digital age

Abstract

This research outlines the reconfiguration of the creative act of drawing through physical practice as a response to mass culture. This practice takes place in the context of developing digital technologies, culminating in metadrawing. Metadrawing is defined as the integration of the post-digital collapse of media specificity in the visual arts. This research posits metadrawing as a descriptor for the paradigm shift between the physical act of drawing in pre-digital mass culture and the principles of drawing incorporated into digital technologies. Through this shift, drawing has become an artistic act that is no longer working to collapse media divisions, and now operates within and without these divisions, destabilised by digital technologies. This research examines drawing as a history of innovations and responses to shifts in technologies and their applications. Questions of genre, form and medium are subsequently downplayed for an interdisciplinary approach. High and low are no longer distinct, as the internet search engine is adopted into the artist's toolbox, alongside the digital camera and animation software. The many accessible and disposable images are integrated as raw matter, to fossick and sift through. Accompanying studio research operates within the interdisciplinary freedoms of the metadrawing. Approaches to quotation, appropriation, pastiche, irony, detachment and sincerity are explored through a rigorous drawing practice, resulting in a vast, multilayered body of work. This self-reflexive and intuitive practice incorporates numerous ciphers into its many suspended, but interrelated narratives. Beyond the physical level, the work operates on an intertextual level, moving between the metaphysics of genre and previously separated art forms to create a reconfigured history, unhampered by previous distinctions and boundaries of media and form. This research posits the act of drawing as a reaction to, or divergence from, the dominant techno-capitalist status quo, treating the tactile experiences of studio practice as subversive, transgressive, and erotic. This research explores the subjectivity and the subjective agency of the artist. Drawing is therefore defined as a process of unrepeatability, a process that, while no longer necessary for picture making, still forms a crucial and engaging tier of the visual arts. Drawing’s divergence from the commercialised intangibility of the digital has revitalized its practitioners, demanding a reconsideration of what is means to draw today. This tension is explored through the different methods of studio practice, on the level of the personal-biological, the erotic, and in terms of collision and materiality. Specific images are selected through criteria directly linked with the subjective agency of the artist, and reconfigured through artistic practice, creating a new imbrication of the raw image matter.