What can we draw from digitality?

Abstract

The findings of this paper relate to a recent body of drawings in my practice that owe its genealogy to the reproductive technologies of printmaking and photography. I relate these findings to my understanding of the ‘index’, borrowing from semiotics, as distinct from the symbol in which it establishes its meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to its referent, therefore bearing marks or traces, whose causal effects signify the object it refers to. This is further extended by both the explosion of digitality that came on the heels of the financial crisis of 2008 and forms of automatism that follow a set of investigative procedures to organize and govern practice but do not determine outcomes. Digitality, here, is either utilized as a visible element of artistic production or utilized as a symptom of the present, materialized as a trace. It flattens the physical axis of the trace into an immediate presence that collapses virtuality and materiality together on a known artefact such as paper.