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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016
Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016
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Noclip World: Drawing the disruptions of virtual video game environments
More LessAbstractModern video games give the player ever more realistic worlds to experience; yet they typically remain carefully cultivated virtual spaces. Cheaters and players who operate against the prevailing logic of the system often expose strange digital phenomena that come with attempts to replicate realistic spaces in game engine environments. Noclip World is an ongoing research project in which I seek to expose the underlying logics of video game spaces using hand drawing as a critical tool. The project explores games based on Valve Corporation’s Source Engine that made games from 2004 to 2016. Through a roving ‘counterplay’ using cheats to suspend in-game physics, I produce a taxonomy of behaviours that manifest in the virtual camera when navigated to the fringes of game worlds. The project references Flusser’s notion of the camera as a ‘black box’ and frames the inner coded workings of a virtual camera as equivocal in its opacity. I subsequently propose transcriptive drawing as a tool to unpick the logics of glitched virtual worlds. Protocols of architectural drawing are used to expose and reassemble the fragmentary spaces detailed in-game through the use of screenshots as preliminary ‘photographic’ recordings. Noclip World questions whether the architect producing drawings of these virtual spaces can become surrogates for the opaque zone of Flusser’s camera, becoming a ‘black box’ themselves. By using drawing to expose the disruption of virtual video game environments, the project ultimately seeks to uncover the contingency of even the most realistic digital depictions of space.
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Envelopes of time: Drawing Boulez’s third milieu
More LessAbstractFrench composer Pierre Boulez first formulated the concepts of the ‘smooth and the striated’ in his musical oeuvre as an expression of his concerns regarding the interaction between continuous and discontinuous musical parameters referred to time and space. Later on, Deleuze and Guattari further established new applications for these ideas relating them to a wide range of non-musical purposes. However, several questions arise such as how the smooth-striated communicate, transform and remain different; is there a third space that intermingles with the system ‘smooth-striated’? And in this instance, how could it be visualized? In order to give answers to these questions, this article explores a third milieu, also introduced by Boulez: the ‘fixed’ space-time that would allow the perception of the communication between the ‘smooth and the striated’. Additionally, this article argues that there is a strong link between the ‘fixed’ and the Deleuzian diagrams, through which the musical concepts could be visualized, presenting a series of drawings as case studies developed using analogical and digital techniques.
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Elastic Perspective: The diagonal line and the production of deep space
More LessAbstractThis article considers a practice of experimental drawing that crosses spatiality, collectivity and temporality. The exercise titled ‘Elastic Perspective’ extends from conceptual drawing and performance practices of the 1960s and 1970s and takes a critical approach to traditional applications of perspective theory in drawing. It differs from other contemporary practices of performance drawing, as the method produces no visual representations or physical objects. Elastic Perspective suggests that perspective can be thought of ‘materially’. Thinking perspective ‘materially’ rather than somewhere between an abstract schema, metaphor for subjectivity and an historical technical rule, the practice reveals new insights into the experience and process of drawing in what has traditionally been thought of as representational space. This study explores the concept of an experimental perspective practice through the description of a performative, relational, immaterial line drawing involving two or more moving participants. Together the untrained participants discover the qualities of the diagonal line in the production of depth in imaginary representational space. The proposition of this practice-led research is that perspective can be considered an elastic relation of materiality in performance, in addition to a symbolic theoretical overlay or latent organizing principle of real space in drawing.
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Illuminated paths: Using light to draw the intermovemental stages of skateboarding tricks
More LessAbstractBy interrogating built form and using intuitive and artistic understandings of space to carve out new landscapes, skateboarders demonstrate how urban space can function in alternative ways. This article explores a way of capturing the divergent contours, peaks and valleys of skateboarders’ paths through space as a series of drawings that not only map variations of urban landscape, but also act as an expression of individuals’ experiential moments in time. My discussion focuses on the work of Buzzy Sullivan, a skateboarder and artist living in Oregon, USA, who shoots long exposure photographs of an LED light-clad skateboard during different skate tricks. In the resulting images the movement of the skateboard appears as a series of drawn light paths, resembling a 3D contour map of an alien terrain. Although these ephemeral light lines have obvious advantages due to their ability to make the sheer variation in contours of movement through space visible, they are reliant on photography for their preservation. Positioned as drawings, the lines of light enable us to visualize how skateboarders navigate environments and provide the DNA strands of each trick as it is being performed. These are drawings about the process of their own creation, acting as a fluid process that awakens new possibilities for sculpting and reading the city. I suggest that Sullivan’s images provide a method for research that captures the nuanced ‘intermovemental’ stages of skateboarding as drawings that help to explain what happens between the board and the ground in a skateboarder’s cartographic constitution of place.
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Drawing to read architectural heritage
More LessAbstractArchitectural documentation is a contextual study that aims to record patterns of lives and rudiments of civilization embedded in the built environment. Documenters collect measurements from historic surfaces and then transcribe these field data into 2D measured drawings that include existing architectural, material and structural conditions. Although the documentation activities seem very straightforward, with a series of actions to portray the architectural heritage through graphical records, the process itself is an interpretive account of the historic structure, which documenters thickly describe in the architectural context. The act of seeing, observing, interpreting and then capturing the essence of cultural heritage offers a methodical process, which carries significant qualities similar to that of thick description widely used in ethnographic fieldwork. Thinking between architectural documentation as an enquiry of thick description and measured drawings as the product of an interpretive account of what the historic structure denotes, this article seeks to acquire an understanding of drawing in architectural documentation, focusing on engagement with cultural heritage.
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Practice-infused drawing research: ‘Being present’ and ‘making present’
Authors: Duncan Bullen, Jane Fox and Philippa LyonAbstractHow can we understand the pivotal value of touch and collaborative processes within two artists’ drawing practice and how do we articulate the generative nature of such practice-based research? Duncan Bullen’s drawing explores the relationship between hand, breath and surface, Jane Fox’s, the semi-resisted action of wind between paper and pencil. Both artists have a shared concern with non-representational drawing processes, an expanded notion of ‘material’ and a focus on the experience of reciprocity between the individual practitioner and the world in which they practice. These concerns are discussed in terms of ‘being present’ and ‘making present’, which this article attempts to conceptualize at an interim stage in the research with reference to theory about drawing, anthropology and meditation practice. The understanding of drawing mobilized here is one in which, as Jane Grisewood argues, ‘seeing’ is not a prerequisite. It is a practice of drawing that is about receiving and being. Lyon, Bullen and Fox are developing a collaborative methodology for this research in which their respective embodied, manual practices of drawing and writing are in dialogue.
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Drawing the house of Abraham
More LessAbstractThis article discusses a research/drawing project entitled Abrahamic Architecture. The research explores the creation of graphite wall drawings towards the development of Jewish, Christian and Islamic architectural history and theory. The objective of the research is to address the gap that currently exists in architectural scholarship related to the co-authored synagogues, churches and mosques of the Abrahamic religions. These collaboratively built structures are termed ‘Abrahamic’ architecture. The research is investigated using research-creation methods that combine creative and traditional academic research techniques to support the development of knowledge through visual investigations.
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Exploring drawing as a generative act: Articulating thought processes in the context of interdisciplinary approaches to drawing pedagogy
More LessAbstractThis article offers an approach to drawing pedagogy and presents case studies of drawings produced by students from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, South India. The project aims to examine whether the conceptual and subjective aspects of drawing can be combined with contextual reading. Students were instructed to draw pictures inspired by texts related to cognitive psychology, anthropology, literature and philosophy. Their whimsical and speculative drawings incorporated conceptual elements from the texts beyond objective representation, demonstrating the influence of interdisciplinary course content on drawing. The results provide new insights into debates of visual literacy and drawing pedagogy.
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Theodora Varnay Jones: Frottage
More LessAbstractTheodora Varnay Jones experiments with frottage drawing in a series of graphite rubbings that she performs on surfaces of found objects. Using translucent paper, she layers her traced drawings and constructs them into abstract compositions. The gradual mechanical fashion, in which her images appear on the page during the progression of her drawing, is reminiscent of slow exposure photography. Through a monotonous pencil motion of crayon rubbing, she shifts her drawing from a perceptual practice into an automatic one. This strategy is part of her long-term intent of objectifying her mark making. As she undermines the conscious aspect of her work, she surrenders her function as a planner. Yet, this submission is not completely passive. While pursuing her work, she observes her new role as the labourer and examines her production. Using this detached method, she develops a new vocabulary with its formality dictated by her impressed surfaces. In the final stage of the work, the artist layers her copies and assembles them into new configurations, in which her images abandon their original literal meaning. She employs this contemplative part of her practice to build tension between the legible graphite tracings and the ultimate abstract form, which transcend them into hovering weightless shapes.
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