I’ve thought a lot about the digital mark and different ways in which it can manifest. One of the primary characteristics of drawing, that I think we take for granted, is the idea of a drawing manifesting as the outcome of a mark-making implement intentionally applied to and dragged accross a given surface whose end result is a mark or series of marks that we read as writing or drawing. What does it mean when you can do either a traditional drawing or one straight into a computer and what effect is having that choice on drawing in general? Is drawing into a computer fundamentally simulacral? Even though the same action used for making a drawing on paper is employed, because it is essentially the recording of a movement into code and translated from code into an image that has the appearance of a drawing, there is no physical artifact until someone presses print. Which part is the drawing? Is there a drawing and do we call it a drawing because it’s the only sensible word for it? Is drawing purely an activity or does it need to meet the criteria described above?
I think that it’s both.
The question of a digital mark is one that is obviously extremely fascinating to me because the digital space is one that I see as a threshold space. You can make a drawing in a computer application and basically do anything with it—make a print, a 3D model, use the information from a drawing and apply it to the movement of a camera in either animation and motion graphics software or (I’m guessing) to guiding actual camera movements, etc.
The 3D Extrusions are experimental work where I thought about a drawing as a literal landscape or architectural structure. They are derived from some drawings that I did, converted into vector-based splines, extruded, and, in one case, animated. I imagine what some of this technology is capable of in terms of creating something monumental in scale, where a drawing I make in my sketchbook can become something that exists in space at a large scale.
