Artisanal Prefigurations of the Digital: Animating Realities, Collage Effects, and Theories of Image Manipulation

For centuries artists have been forming and transforming the image point by point. At its most basic, a pencil traces the points, while an eraser adjusts, rectifies. A layering of washes may create a more fluid distillation of points. Textures of paint, impasto may create a thicker surface, building points on top of points into an actual third dimension of tactile space in front of the image plane. All these formations and transformations might be called artisanal: techniques of craft, skill, and hard work. We usually think of this artisanal process not as a setting of points, but as a continuum. I draw a line, descriptive, expressive, gestural, fluid. If I am drawing from nature, then the line may be somewhat analogous to the referent.

Yet we know each line I draw potentially has been plotted. "Plotting" is a word we associate more with design and architectural drawing than with free drawing; it resonates suggestively with narrativity, and with all constructivist art. Potentially at least, any line I draw is nothing more than a series of darker points inscribing its difference from the field of lighter points surrounding it (or if the paper is black and the implement, light, the reverse). These lines are plotted against the invisible but implied grid of a geometrical division of the rectangle (or square, circle or other shaped surface). In addition, these lines are plotted against the void, against an infinity of space that is not this line.

Every time we draw we etch just such a progression or mass of points. We mark a surface differential. In a sense the theory that brought this home was not that formulated around computer generated imagery, but that which preceded and anticipated it, if only by a few decades; if MacDraw allows us to reconceptualize drawing as a presence and absence of pixels, this certainly finds its precedent in any point on any drawing surface conceived of as merely such an actualization of its potentiality. Consider such wonderful theoretical works as Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements and Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook. ¹

First though, let's consider a children's toy "Etch-a-Sketch": I remember this toy periodically when working with programs such as MacDraw, MacPaint, Painter, Ofoto, and PhotoShop. A red plastic frame, two white knobs surrounding a screen that looked like a television screen, Etch-a-Sketch is a primitive machine for drawing with knobs that control a line. It is a machine with a bias towards straight lines, for to draw a curve, one had to combine the rotation of both knobs, coordinating the movement of both hands. Further, the line was always continuous within the entire drawing surface. One could not end the line and begin again elsewhere. This constraint, etched into the design of this toy drawing apparatus, prepares us in a sense for the computer as a drawing apparatus; all programs, all apparatuses that tie the body, hand, and eye to the machine have their constraints, though less obvious ones. The Etch-a-Sketch can teach us, in extremis, something about the more subtle limitations of image-making and image-modifying computer programs.

Such computer programs simulate drawing, painting, and the art and techniques of the darkroom. The "knobs" that we conceptually turn in these programs with our index finger on the button of a "mouse" are amazing, yet awkward. Our virtual "toolboxes" produce simulacra of a large repertoire of gestures and processes known to the image making arts. They work as analogues to real processes, processes which digitalization allows us to simulate. The codes of analogy have migrated here. No longer do we simply have only codes of analogy to the visual referent (and let's remember, please, that we still have those rampant in video and digitalization), we now have codes...