A Field of Interconnected Realities: Cyber Drawing and Mash-Up Electronic Goodness
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Digital Performance
Presentation Title:
- A Field of Interconnected Realities: Cyber Drawing and Mash-Up Electronic Goodness
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose to reflect upon the practice of drawing in the context of cyberformance. We present and analyse the project “A field of interconnected realities” that was shown in Auckland, part of the public art Project Living Room 2010. The webcam operators, Paula Roush in Auckland and Maria Lusitano in Malmo, collaborated through webcams in the development of a series of networked drawing performances, inspired in the artist’s book “A week of goodness” made by Max Ernst in 1934. In this collage book, Ernst had arranged and re-drawn cut-up images of women, men, animals, dragons, plants, and indoor /outdoor situations, to produce hybrid bodies and surreal landscapes, that presented a dark, surreal world addressing themes of sexuality, anti-clericalism and war. These collages, by dislocating the visual significance of the source material, tried to suggest what had been repressed. Revisiting these images, we produced new networked collages and drawings in a networked performative process that included a collaboration with the public. Relying on techniques such as hand drawing, drawing with the use of sketch-a-graph ( a machine that can both enlarge and reduce an image whilst copying it), water colour, acrylic painting and collage, we produced revised bio-tech versions of that book, addressing the new unconscious phantasies, dreams, fears and expectations of our zeit geist. The outputs of this project are the networked drawings and also the 5 films that resulted from documenting the production of each drawing.
This collective project, which placed drawing into a disruptive new situation, challeged the usual characteristics atributed to this medium. It addressed the dream fantasies of the past, placing them into the present (through the mashing up of Max Ernst’s images book with contemporary ones ), and revisited the various historical devices that have been commonly used to make drawings. The glitches, pixelisation and splitting of the images produced by the webcamstreaming device, introduced a new puzzling time/space dimensionality to this experience and served as a trope/interface to the production of a contemporary dreaming space where the new collages/ drawings revisit the collective unconscious fears and fantasies of today.
