I have a resistance to a mystification of digital drawing that seems to arise from comparisons with
'traditional' drawing. I prefer to think of digital image-making as more akin to photographic or
printmaking processes than to directly marking surfaces.
Digital artwork does have a physical state - an arrangment of electrons on a silicon chip - and
although we cannot see this directly, we are used to this virtuality, from photography. We take a
picture on film and we can't see it until we do something to it to make it visible. What I think of as
the 'grain' of digital images (the pixel resolution) is usually very crude compared to drawing
directly on a surface. Vector images don't have the same grain as bitmap images, but both are still
dependent on output devices (printer, screen, plotter etc), which are still very crude compared to
marks on a surface.
It is possible to alter digital images extensively, but it is also possible to process film, printing
plates or drawings extensively or to translate them to the stimulation of other senses.
Some of the wonder of digitalisation is the speed with which changes and translations can be
made. And this is enabled partly because digital images contain information which (at present) is
vastly simplified compared to what our senses are used to dealing with.
Julian Howell
(Kingston University MA drawing as Process student)
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