The Legart Archive
Some sketches working with still images of the surface of some Spotted Gums, pixillated/animated in the computer and envisaged as a public space projection. Made during a residency at Bundanon Trust (NSW) in April 2003, the environmental impact of wholesale tree-felling was not seen, but felt.
A film by Mike Leggett of an event at Angela Flowers Gallery produced by Ian Breakwell during 1971 in which a group of labourers shovelled earth over the course of an ‘8-hour day’, to celebrate the first anniversary of the gallery. On the second floor of the gallery, each man continuously shovelled earth onto the adjacent man’s mound of earth, while at the same time and by coincidence, the Apollo astronauts were digging up rock samples on the surface of the moon. While every TV shop window showed live footage of the activities on the moon, the media installation relayed the event via CCTV to their street-level window. Gradually through the course of the day, as the all-white gallery space was reduced to a sea of mud, the pictures relayed from each event became almost indistinguishable from each other. The 16mm film record was restored to digital video in 2003.
“Based on performances by Ian Breakwell which took place in London, Bristol and Swansea, Unword is an amalgam of text, performance, sculpture, sound and projection. The series of Unword mixed-media performances during 1969-70 incorporated the simultaneous projections and visual recording of each event as part of the performance by Mike Leggett. The subsequently processed film footage would become part of the multi-projection elements of the next Unword performance, which would also be filmed, processed, and then projected in the next performance, and so on. The projection of the footage was on a Spectro stop frame analysis projector, (a scientific examination tool), running at 2 frames per second. The scarcity of such projectors meant that the Unword stop frame film which Mike Leggett edited after the end of the series of performances, could only occasionally be shown together with a soundtrack on tape compiled from the original tapes of language lessons and eyesight tests plus voice-over narrations by Ian Breakwell used in the original Unword performances.”
In 2003 Mike Leggett and Ian Breakwell digitally reconstructed the Unword film as a video installation. Collection of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London – see catalogue essay (2006) by Victoria Worsley in left column.
In 2010 a questionnaire devised by Breakwell in 1970 was located, together with my responses to aspects of the collaboration, its production and reflections upon its affect.
Based on performances by Ian Breakwell which took place in London, Bristol and Swansea, Unword is an amalgam of text, performance, sculpture, sound and projection. The series of Unword mixed-media performances during 1969-70 incorporated the simultaneous visual recording of each event as part of the performance by Mike Leggett. The subsequently processed film footage would become part of the multi-projection elements of the next Unword performance, which would also be filmed, processed, and then projected in the next performance, and so on. The projection of the footage was on a Spectro stop frame analysis projector, (a scientific examination tool), running at 2 frames per second. The scarcity of such projectors meant that the Unword stop frame film which Mike Leggett edited after the end of the series of performances, could only occasionally be shown together with a soundtrack on tape compiled from the original tapes of language lessons and eyesight tests plus voice-over narrations by Ian Breakwell used in the original Unword performances.
In 2003 Mike Leggett and Ian Breakwell digitally reconstructed the Unword film as a video installation. Collection of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“This document is about broadcast television in Britain in 1973.”
Following the award of a prize in an art competition sponsored by a local television station, I campaigned with other film and video prizewinners, including Beau Geste Press, to have our work screened on the channel. Prizewinners in other categories had their work exhibited publicly whilst the best the station was prepared to offer was the screening of some extracts from the moving image work. The station finally offered a discussion about their refusal to screen complete works in a monthly magazine arts program. The 15-minute broadcast item became a performance and discussion intended to raise questions about the ownership and access to Britain’s three television channels. Documentation of the whole event was completed with a book published by Beau Geste Press in 1974. (NB Britain at the time had three television channels in any one geographical area, two run by the BBC and one by commercial franchises. It was not until 1981 that Britain licensed another television channel, Channel Four, with a remit to provide access to a wider range of program makers, including artists. Television by its very centralised nature defines for the many the tastes of the few, a situation much changed in the era of the internet).
The Image Con Text project commenced in 1978 and was about interaction of the analogue kind, between the artist and an audience gathered for a screening of artists’ film. During the event interpretive information, or contextualising material as it was called then, provided to ‘new’ audiences a way into the artworks, whilst giving access to the conditions and processes involved in giving the films and tapes the form and content observed.
“Leggett’s early experiment was with film, though his exploration of video started in the ’70s with CCTV and performance … and re-contextualising the video image as film, to questioning the electronic technology and its ‘ambiguities’. Leggett has moved fluidly between shifting moving-image technologies, film, video and digital, and engages the audience directly with the associated and variable discourses.” – J.Hatfield*
The Image Con Text project comprised three parts. The first, described some of the conditions that had been involved in determining the artworks, from two distinct approaches – from the artists’ viewpoint, (Image Con Text: One); then later in 1981 from the audience viewpoint, (Image Con Text: Two). The second part of the project was on-going research, with regular live presentations to audiences, the feedback from which would inform subsequent presentations. Thirdly, a videotape version made in 1983 archived both presentation performances thus extending their meanings to later audiences. Interactive study utilising the dynamic linking of the digital format continued the process, with analogue to digital transfer by the Rewind project (University of Dundee 2005) and distribution via DVD and the Web.
*The PDF is the MS version of a chapter about the project in Experimental Film and Video (2006), John Libbey, London (ed. Dr Jackie Hatfield).
The Image Con Text project when it commenced in 1978 was about interaction of the analogue kind, between the artist and an audience gathered for a screening. It presented a multiplicity of information, or contextualising material as it was called then, to provide for ‘new’ audiences not only a way into the artworks but also access to the conditions and processes which gave them the form and the content they adopted. This practice-based research, as it is now called, being pursued or produced during that period was rigorous as well as vigorous, but for the most part unrecognised as such.
The pro-active, interventionist strategy pursued was partly in response to schemes that had been initiated by funders such as the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB)1, to subsidise screening venues for the cost of transporting, accommodating and paying a screening fee to artists invited to show their work to a local audience. A condition for accepting the subsidy was that there would be no admission fee. This ruled out many commercial or semi-commercial venues with overhead costs to maintain. The majority of venues were those who already had these costs covered such as colleges of art, universities and public exhibition spaces and screens. Consequently, many of the audiences were younger people who had little knowledge of the work or its context.
The screenings I undertook in the mid-70s followed a pattern adopted by many visiting artists – a few introductory words and then at the end of the screening, opening-up responses from the (usually) youthful audience. The Image Con Text project provided a context for viewing the film and video works I would often be invited to screen – it wasn’t exactly a history lesson, or about philosophy, or politics, or a tenuously connected series of anecdotes, but something of a mix of all these. It employed a format that combined different media forms, described variously as expanded cinema, film performance or simply, performance work. It was part of a process of convergence of media that had been occurring amongst practitioners throughout the 60s and 70s. It was not until later that ‘media art’ became the generally accepted term for this activity.
The Image Con Text project comprised three parts. The first, described some of the conditions that had been involved in giving the films the form they adopted. This took two distinct approaches as presentational performances – from the artists’ viewpoint in 1978, then later in 1981 from the audience viewpoint, (the film-maker being a section of the audience too). The second aspect of the project was as on-going research, regular live presentations to audiences, the feedback from which could be fed into subsequent presentations. Thirdly, a videotape version not only archived the presentation performance but extended its meanings to later audiences. This process was later extended following transfer to DVD, introducing the possibility of interactive study utilising the dynamic linking of the format.
Abstract
Drawing – the use of line and tone – is at the other end of a technology timeline currently unravelling in the digital age of information. Drawing – an economy of means in the elaboration of purpose – is currently practiced as a process by artists working in many mediums that prepares for, or completes the final outcome, a visual artifact. The dynamics of the rapidly developing communities of interest within digital media, particularly where encountered within on-line culture, accords the visual dimension only part of the bandwidth that appends our modern perceptual faculties. The babble that is the Internet offers us a network of threads that can be studio and gallery but more importantly, a space without fixed dimensions or contained objects, where if you like, apples and pears are still seeking forms of representation where place, time and flavour are meaningful to connoisseurs as well as surfers and other electronic flaneurs. (Published later in Artlink Aug 2001)
The International Drawing Research Institute Conference
COFA, UNSW,
Saturday 25th August 2001
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 1
Paper presented at
The International Drawing Research Institute Conference
COFA, UNSW,
Saturday 25th August 2001
DRAWING the THREADS
By Mike Leggett
Dave Cubby, ‘Techead#9.1’, 1983, silver
gelatin print, ‘, …'drawing with light' as part
of a continuum of technology concerned with
animation, replication and simulation…’
Abstract
Drawing – the use of line and tone – is at the other end of a technology
timeline currently unravelling in the digital age of information.
Drawing – an economy of means in the elaboration of purpose – is
currently practiced as a process by artists working in many mediums
that prepares for, or completes the final outcome, a visual artifact.
The dynamics of the rapidly developing communities of interest
within digital media, particularly where encountered within on-line
culture, accords the visual dimension only part of the bandwidth that
appends our modern perceptual faculties. The babble that is the
Internet offers us a network of threads that can be studio and gallery
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 2
but more importantly, a space without fixed dimensions or contained
objects, where if you like, apples and pears are still seeking forms of
representation where place, time and flavour are meaningful to
connoisseurs as well as surfers and other electronic flaneurs.
Drawing the Threads1
Drawing – the use of line and tone – is at the other end of the
technological timeline currently transiting the digital age of
information. The practice of drawing can range from a tool for honing
perceptual faculties to allowing the free-flow of the obsessive
compulsive component of our personalities.
Is it possible for the newer technologies to offer the contemporary
artist the directness of working and the ability to rapidly accumulate
visual ideas that the pencil and paper have offered over the centuries?
This short survey of mainly Australian artists will examine ways in
which drawing – an economy of means in the elaboration of purpose –
is currently practiced by artists working primarily with digital media.
Some 35 artists were asked in email correspondence whether they felt
their work owed something to drawing as a specific discipline, or if it
was still a part of their current practice that prepared for or completed
a final outcome, the visual artifact.
They were asked whether they had received a art school training
which included drawing classes and if this had predisposed them to
the use of the Wacom tablet2 and or whether a preference for the tool
was more fundamental.
Three descriptions of the term ‘drawing’ were offered stretching from
the classical (romantic) notion of the three dimensional world and its
representation on a two dimensional surface, through the more
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 3
academic recording of the organic and its analysis in monotone, to the
use of the pencil or pen as gestural tool for mark-making. This
description was intended to provoke objections and encourage people
to develop different conclusions about the drawing discipline and
contemporary media. Artists contacted were also asked to accompany
their responses with images.
In making any comparison between the pencil and the pixel, there is
clearly an element of comparing apples and pears in this far from still
life. The movement of technologies gathered under the rubric of
digital media are in a constant and rapid state of flux as once
expensive facilities become cheaper by the month offering the artist a
cornucopia of possibilities. The dynamics of the rapidly developing
communities of interest within digital media, particularly its ‘on-line
culture’ manifestation, accords the visual dimension only part of the
bandwidth that appends our modern perceptual faculties. The babble
that is the Internet offers us a network of threads3 that can be studio
and gallery but more importantly, a space without fixed dimensions
or contained objects, where if you like, apples and pears are still
seeking forms of representation where place, time and flavour are
meaningful to connoisseurs as well as surfers and other electronic
flaneurs.
Of course the very existence of computers, the artist Maria Miranda
reminds me, has been dependent on the ancient crafts of first drawing
and then etching the copper of their printed circuit boards.
‘Draw how the plant grows…’ for me was a memorable phrase from
my drawing teacher at Croydon College of Art in the 60s. It took me
for the first time into the realm where the pencil, the eyes and the
intellect combined to express visual knowledge.
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 4
Paul Thomas
Paul Thomas the Perth-based artist encountered ‘the Coldstream
tradition’ in England where:
“All the ingredients in the drawing are given the same importance,
relevant points are used to construct the image. … To make the first
mark is to sum up the possible distance between the seer and the seen.
That one mark alone is to suggest distance, depth of tone, placement,
etc from that mark things only become more complex”.
Paul Thomas
In common with many other older generation media artists, Thomas
publishes much of his work on website or CD-ROM. “My drawing led
me to a way of seeing the world with a desire to communicate about
my perception of things. Using the camera as a drawing tool assisted
me in documenting my ideas, drawing out ideas.”
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 5
Harriet Napier Birks, 'Vampyr' , 2001, digital video still from
Fractal Woman II
Harriet Birks, a graduate of the new generation: “I have been
obsessively compulsively drawing since I was inside the womb. The
few drawing classes I did attend have had little affect on what I do
now … “
Harriet Birks, ‘a_dreamy_spacious_thing’
Birks observes: “One of the great advantages of human evolution is
that we have this thing called a 'precision grip', which is hard to utilise
with a mouse. ….. using a mouse is like drawing with a stick.”
Presented here as images fixed in time, Harriet Birks use of drawing
functions properly as moving images delivered in the linear timebased
medium of video, or the soft mode of Internet delivered
Shockwave Flash animation as in this very brief example:
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 6
[RUN: ‘Siren’.swf Flash animation file – approximately 20 second
loop, through next four paras.]
Artists who use the computer like a studio have many options for the
form the final work will have: ink-jet or laser print, photograph,
website, CD-ROM, animation on website, videotape or film. Like a
majority of the computer-based artists I contacted, Birks chooses to
work with the ‘drawing/graphics tablet interface’ and has assimilated
in a relatively short time a considerable experience with a whole
gamut of computer-based tools which value spontaneity over analysis
and control. “….the sheer quantity of colours, texture, image
resources, the mess factor – drawing in the computer allows for more
artistic freedom. …” she says… “Animation is very much like drawing
– spatial drawing. Rather than creating a still perspective window, I
try to create 3D moving and layered perspectives with vector
graphics.”
Vector graphics is software designed to describe flat planes of colour
or tone using vectors or lines to draw vanishing point perspectives
and thus create the kind of spaces first drawn onto paper or
woodblock in Europe 500 years ago. Vectors are described by the
software using coordinates to construct a polygon which can be filled
with tone or colour – in utilising minimal mathematics the processing
therefore undertaken by the computer’s processor is instant. Thus any
changes made to the image, for instance the apparent movement of
objects within the perspective drawing when presented as a sequence
of changes, effectively become an animated motion picture. The file
size for a movie sequence thus created is very compact and can thus
be packed into a Ninetendo or Playstation module.
Vector graphics were used extensively for simulation race/chase
games – though the drawing was crude and jaggy it was at times
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 7
extremely ingenous and could trick the eye into believing vast tracts of
space were being traversed whereas in fact subtle changes were being
made using looped or recombitant file fragments sequecned to
produce the desired effect. Contemporary games machines and home
computers today have much more processing power and over the last
five years games makers have therefore been able to employ 3D
animation software to render onto the drawings photographic-like
surfaces. The film-like results too often lack much ingenuity in either
visual invention or simulated action.
With the advent of the Web and the combination for some artists such
as Harriet Birks of studio and gallery into one location, vector graphics
have entered a new era of usefulness – the low file size and data rate
are invaluable when conveying visual data over the World Wide Wait
of the Internet and becomes an important factor when making drawn
animation for that purpose using a software tool such as Flash.
The expression, ‘an economy of line’ assumes several meanings in the
context of this digital domain.
Ruth Fleishman
Another recent graduate Ruth Fleishman from Melbourne observed: “I
am very interested in seeing what are the specific qualities of drawing
with a mouse and scanning hand draw images. They take on
completely new qualities that have a specific aesthetic.”
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 8
The description of this aesthetic was elusive for many of the recent
graduates to describe – however, the difference she detects is maybe
not so far removed from the linkages that occurred many years ago
between artists who drew and commercial screen printmakers – with a
massive difference: at the computer workstation there is no toxic ink
and washes, no acres of drying racks and plan chests. Such
advantageous health and costing factors appeal not only to teaching
institutions but to the nascent artists themselves and together with
other factors perhaps explains the extraordinary amount of interest
being shown in these recent tools and media forms.
Let’s move onto one of the old men of Australian animation! John E.
Hughes, one of the teachers here at COFA, has worked with just about
every mode of animation known to motion-picture history. He
currently develops and completes many ideas (using similar tools to
Harriet Birks), with the utmost economy of line, and hence file size.
[RUN: HughesWardrobe.swf – Flash animation narrative of 2 minutes
duration]
Now the kind of economy of line I’m talking here is 400kB – about the
same size as a medium sized Word document and delivered to me in
the same way – as an attachment with an email.
John Hughes confesses: “I cover my Wacom tablet with paper – to
give a better grip and texture….. It's similar to using ink and brush but
it's as if your brush is made from something flexible but quiet stiff and
has a limitless supply of free flowing ink…..” (Sounds like a riddle….)
Whilst drawing software enables imitation of drawing with a pencil or
pen, the processing power of a computer extends the craft aspects of
drawing to unique possibilities, effected by simply pressing a button:
he continues: “I really like what happens as you repeatable hit the
*Simplify* button. The line seems to shrink around the shapes you
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 9
draw. You can go all the way till it ends up looking like a wood cut….
The image was drawn to depict a jury specifically for an animation.”
John E. Hughes, The jury: detail from ‘Wardrobe’, Flash animation.
Alyssa Rothwell has completed several prize-winning interactive CDROMs
including ‘Three Mile Creek’ “I have no formal drawing skills, I
have always just liked to draw.”.
Alyssa Rothwell, ‘Three Mile Creek, 1996, CD-ROM
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 10
“A hand drawn approach seems appropriate for the subjects I explore, that of a
rural Australian … the computer provides you with an environment to test and
experiment, you have the freedom to take line drawings and recompose, scale,
shift, edit, undo, duplicate etc. – the drawing becomes less precious and
multipurpose…”
“There is something really special about the simplicity of drawing and
using just pencil and paper…it brings a warmth to the process that I
have not experienced when drawing and working directly to the
screen…”
Mr Snow, a graduate four years ago of Sydney College of the Arts,
similarly describes his “software primarily as a set of drawing tools
for exploring ideas…”, a frequently repeated description by emerging
artists who still include pencil and paper as part of the process:
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 11
He goes on:
“…a sketch from a sketch book will prompt some exploration in a 3d
[software] environment on how light and shade will fall over a
particular sculpture. This will prompt further sketching or painting,
followed by more exploration digitally, perhaps thumbnailling a
movie to understand better its dimensionality and which angles work
best”.
[RUN Bridge.mov Quicktime VR file, and demonstrate mouse
controlled movement possible around image.]
Snow also uses his skills to ‘pre-visualise’ ideas and concepts for other
artists – like the movie storyboard, pre-production planning is
facilitated and in the case of commissions, clients are reassured with
‘fly-arounds’ and ‘fly-throughs’.
To flying fish, by Phillip George, a teacher here at the College of Fine
Arts. Pre-visualisation is also the requisite he identifies for
constructing his composite prints.
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 12
Skills gained through analytical drawing such as ‘scaling,
foreshortening and aspect ratio’ map the image and give him the
ability to pre-visualise “a given parallax distortion/manipulation” as
well as other skills gained through analytical drawing such as scaling,
foreshortening and aspect ratio.
Peter Callas attended Sydney College of the Arts between 1978-80.
“Drawing was definitely not considered part of the retinue of skills
required for contemporary artists. There were, on principle, no life
drawing classes at all. … Drawing has always been a highly significant
activity for me. On the other hand, despite what I've said above about
life drawing, I've never been particularly interested in "observational"
or accurate drawing. My style of drawing has always been intuitive
rather than observational.”
Callas was a film-maker who migrated to the Fairlight video processor
after leaving college. “I now use the second smallest Wacom tablet
available and do most of my drawing on a Powerbook [portable
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 13
computer] at the kitchen table. …. a stylus is [for me] the most familiar
object to hold – far more familiar than a mouse … The stylus relates
back to the world I grew up in, but interfaces to the new, and in so
many ways alien, world I now work in.
“Drawing over digitised photographs is another form of analysis or
concentrated observation of an image…[and]… brings you to noticing
things in an image which you would otherwise take for granted.
Sometimes you are forced to make decisions about what a line or dark
shape represents in a photograph – things which are not obvious with
a simple glance.”
Peter Callas, Detail of a section of the Trionfo della Morte fresco, (c.1330), Master of
the Triumph of Death, Camposanto, Pisa, with proposed interpretation for
animation on right, 2001.
Callas is currently working on an commissioned animated
interpretation of the famous mid-14th century Triumph of Death
(Trionfo della Morte) fresco cycle in the Camposanto in Pisa. “In 1944
the Camposanto was bombed [which] all but destroyed most of the
frescos. The four I am working on are amongst the very few that
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 14
survived. However one surprising discovery was made as a result of
the fire. The sinopie (underdrawings) were discovered pretty much
intact.”
“ Having determined what the frescos might have looked like, the
phase after that will be imagining how the figures might be
meaningfully altered for the purposes of the animation, and then how
they will be animated.”
Callas’s attention has been taken more recently by software which
take vector and spline-based4 approaches rather than the more
common pixel-based tools. Tools such as these take him “further away
from the simulation of traditional drawing to the point where they are
two disparate and quite separate activities.”
Points in 3D space which can be represented with pencil marks on
paper, have their equivelent as the pixel points of the computer screen,
which using a combination of software and hardware are activated,
each pixel having a brightness and colour corresponding to a
representation of the captured scene. Spline-based drawing in the
computer, where the shapes of lines can be manipulated or changed at
any phase in the creative process according to algorithms designed
into the software, whilst being far removed from the perception and
expression of physical relationships nonetheless return to the basic
tenet of the drawing process – “Nothing is permanent and any element
can be changed at any time.” The provisional, the temporary, relying
on subtlety of line and tone, within the sinopie, upon a screen,
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 15
preceeds forward movement. The machine can simply provide a
cascading series of variations based on ‘a selection’ or ‘the previous
step’, allowing the artist to isolate an element or whole, from which
emerges the next step in the creative process.
Most artists work with propriety software, bought off the shelf, in
most cases designed by software engineers aided with some market
research.5
Machine made images are nothing new – printing techniques for
producing images in serial form have been around for centuries – but
providing machines with software containing a set of rules to decide
the image’s appearance is more recent. In the late 1960s Harold Cohen
left his position as a teacher and painter at the Slade School to build a
machine.
Harold Cohen observes the output of a painting in 1995 on a
plotter, with a completed work hanging on the wall behind.
Photo courtesy of Becky Cohen.
“AARON is an autonomous intelligent entity: not very autonomous,
or very intelligent, or very knowledgeable, but very different,
fundamentally different, from programs designed to be "just" tools.”6
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 16
The earliest versions of AARON7 could do very little more than to
distinguish between figure and ground, closed forms and open forms,
and to perform various simple manipulations on those structures.
That may not have been enough, however, had AARON not
performed, as humans do, in feedback mode. All its decisions about
how to proceed with a drawing, from the lowest level of constructing
a single line to higher-level issues of composition, were made by
considering what it wanted to do in relation to what it had done
already.8
The latest versions of AARON are now sold by an internet company9
in its miniature form as a screensaver, (“We create software that
creates art”), the full version produces large scale ‘figurative’ paintings
in coloured ink which are exhibited around the world.
Ex-pat Simon Biggs is now Research Professor at Sheffield University,
but in the early 80s was working with CSIRO, the Commonwealth
Science and Industry Research Organisation in Sydney, he quote:
“…was working with gesture recognition systems to help create large
scale ink on paper drawings. These were made using a very large scale
industrial plotting kit as output, with video capture as well as light
pens and tablets, as input. What resulted looked a bit like a cross
between Pollock and Le Witt…. Ironically, this work came directly out
of research I was doing into remote sensing systems for interactive
installations, but had a temporary use in what were effectively
automatic drawing pieces. This research was applied in my
installations initially in the mid 80's and then became the core of my
practice during the 90's.”
[RUN: BOOK OF SHADOWS CD-ROM : select Installations –
Shadows; followed by Book of Shadows; and then Figures.]
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 17
Simon Biggs: Sequence option from ‘Figures’.
Horst Kiechle at the German National Research Center for
Information Technology. Stereo projection and liquid crystal
glasses let the operator see a truly three-dimensional
representation floating in the space above and in front of the
two projection tables of the virtual workbench.
Having had access to research facilities in Australia, (inc an MFA from
this COFA), and in Germany and Sweden, part of Horst Kiechle’s art
practice “….explores the introduction of irregular and more sculptural
shapes into architecture. … since 2D plan drawings use the convention
of right angles for the floor plans, elevations and cross-sections it is no
surprise that architecture is dominated by the right angle.” He
predicts that “a more intuitive approach to drawing 3D spaces will
become available once immersive virtual reality is combined with a
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 18
tool that generates and manipulates surfaces through tracked body
movement in space.”
Tracked body movement suggests a nexus where mark-making onto a
flat surface can be interpreted as the trace of the physical body that
made the mark – some wall graffiti ‘tags’ suggest this, besides the
better known classical and modern masterworks – in that the weight
of the mark indicates, is in correspondence with the musculature and
limb extensions of the drawer. This indexical link, connoting presence
of the author, is a point of consistent reference for many artists:
“…a signature which implies the hand..” as the IMM artist John
Colette has put it to me,
or “..part of a more ‘subjective’ tone in my work” as Sally Pryor has
described it.
Paul Brown, ‘The Book of Transformations – 1of 8’, 2000, iris print edition of 20
Brisbane-based artist Paul Brown’s drawing had “..its origins in the
systems approach to mark making that was a part of my formative
experiences in the 1960's”. The approach he takes today utilises a
combination of drawing programmes and those that enable
permutations of, in the example the above, four drawn shapes which
are randomly changed and combined together within a basic grid.
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 19
“The next project I'm currently ramping up to is evolving a tribe of
drawing robots.”
[RUN: Paul Brown, ‘Chronos’ from website ]
“Mark-making and the evolution of symbolic languages” is a central
component of Troy Innocent’s practice. “The immediacy of pen and
ink is a benefit when cycling through possible images.” These evolve
into creatures and phantastic environments with sets of rules and
procedures that the visitor can learn by interacting with the
environment when installed into a public space in a gallery or on the
internet.
Innocent says that he is: “…playing with the perception of the viewer
by juxtaposing convention with artifacts in representation. For
example, using naturalistic lighting and perspective in the
representation of an obviously artificial world”.
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 20
‘Techead #9.1’ Dave Cubby. Digital file taken from a
35mm copy of a silver gelatin print, made from an original multiple exposure
negative. (Collection AGNSW) 1983
As David Cubby has pointed out:
“I see that at the age of twenty-one I made a barely conscious but farreaching
decision to redirect all my personal emphasis on drawing
away from the pencil into the machine. It's a decision that I sometimes
regret, but it was a very sincere…….I see the photograph, 'drawing
with light' as part of a continuum of technology concerned with
animation, replication and simulation, we seem to have a need to do
this. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy knew that……..The act of 'close observation'
has been superseded or augmented in form from drawing to linguistic
and scientistic (if not scientific) configurations, as texts and
discussions are produced similar to the conduct and tradition of
philosophy in the west. In a sense 'drawing' as a cerebral condition
continues throughout.”
There has recently been methodology applied to measure this – John
Tchalenko at Camberwell College of Arts in London heads research
into drawing and cognition. He has been using a computer-based
device to monitor eye movements to determine the ‘gaze point’, whilst
a subject simultaneously places a cursor on that point – in effect an eye
mouse. In a series of experiments into what he called ‘free eye
drawing’, he found that the drawing trained artist was “capable of
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 21
slower, steady eye movements” and were much better “when tracing
a curve” on the screen using the device. 10
The means of representation that the digital age has opened up goes
beyond the opportunities that were offered to the visual arts by the
20th Century media of cinema, radio and television. Artists were earlier
adopters of film, sound and video and have been foremost in the past
decade in advancing the possibilities offered by digital media.
However, this has moved away from the artist’s traditional autonomy
and leads to an increasing reliance than in earlier times upon scientists
and technologists to provide the tools necessary for work to be
undertaken.
As cross-media hybrids develop between the visual arts, sound, dance
and other performance forms, physical barriers and perspectives break
down. Melbourne-based musician and sonic artist Damien Everett
tells me:
“Drawing is performance: each line gesturally encapsulates the
psycho/physical state of the artist … the Internet is enabling artists to
communicate and collaborate in ways previously unimaginable … my
VRmuse software application seeks to integrate these potentials into a
flexible system for realtime web based performance.” As one of the
generation brought up with computers, Everett has barely paused in
picking up the programming skills he feels are necessary for the
development of tools, such as his on-line performance space Vrmuse,
which is due to launch, real soon now…. It will be a freely available
download from: http://vrmuse.com/
Collaboration on the Net is perhaps its most positive feature. The socalled
‘open source movement’, has included the sharing of solutions,
perspectives if you will, for compositional aspects which are referred
to as architecture within the software community, where ‘libraries’ of
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 22
‘objects’ are kept on ‘server’ computers storing re-usable lines of
programming code and shared amongst collaborators on often
unrelated projects.
The notion of the atelier is the very basis of much of this work, with
the more experienced leading and advising the newbies, but with each
reserving the right to adapt and innovate the work completed by
others. Drawing and ‘code-cutting’ (programming) attracts the
somewhat obsessive personality, dedicated to long hours of practice,
intent upon a perfection, even an elegance. Like the pencil mark on
paper, writing computer code can be unforgiving in producing a
visually precise outcome that manages to elaborate its purpose.
This brief outline of a more or less spontaneous and blurted query to
the 25 artists who responded – by the way, only about 5 of them could
see no connection between what they were doing with digital media
and the notion of drawing – is part of the documentation
accumulating that describe these hybrid days through which the
digital media are passing. With practitioners skilled in the arts of
earlier media and mediums, on a timeline from charcoal drawing to
video installation, those of us who are seeing some potential, some
opportunities or, like myself, have sensed that the tools of digital
media complement and help express what was always just out of
reach with ‘single-channel’ statements, have quite a way to go yet
before digital media artworks become as accepted and respected as
have the works on paper that are collected by museums and galleries,
and adorn the walls of our homes.
We are in a situation of flux. The tools with which we work are
upgraded by the month. The aesthetic discourse amongst artists
addresses huge areas of the humanities and the sciences. Heresies of
representation are perpetrated that unsettle audiences both general
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 23
and specialist. Most difficult of all is accessing the spaces properly
equipped to exhibit the work to the audience.
But we’ve heard all that before –
We heard all that 500 years ago – in a time we call the Renaissance.
END
Thanks to all the artists who contributed to this article. All quotes by
artists were gathered via email May-July 2001 unless otherwise
footnoted.
Quoted artists’ websites:
Paul Thomas http://sea.curtin.edu.au +
http://www.visiblespace.com
Harriet Napier Birks: http://www.geocities.com/mrbleem
Maria Miranda http://www.out-of-sync.com
Mr Snow http://laudanum.net
Alyssa Rothwell http://www.FromMyPerch.com
Phillip George http://www.jungledrums.com/phillipgeorge
Peter Callas http://www.anu.edu.au/ITA/CSA/callas
Simon Biggs http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
Horst Kiechle : http://www.vislab.usyd.edu.au/staff/horst
Sally Pryor : http://www.ozemail.com.au/~spryor/bio.html
© mike leggett June 29, 2002 page 24
Paul Brown : http://www.paul-brown.com/
Troy Innocent : http://www.iconica.org/
Damien Everett : http://vrmuse.com/
©Mike Leggett
17 Ivy Street, Darlington, NSW 2008 tel + fax: +612 9310 1169
Australia eMail: legart@ozemail.com.au
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~legart
1 A shortened version of this paper appeared with the same title in Artlink, (Adelaide) August 2001.
2 Instead of controlling the position of the cursor, or drawing point, on the screen using the usual ‘mouse’, the
drawing/graphics tablet interface is a flat plastic, slighty raised surface which responds to the position of the
pointer, a pen-shaped device, held onto the surface and producing a corresponding position on the screen. As
well as creating points and lines on screen, the pointer is used to gesturally activate the menues and palettes
available within the software application being employed. Of the 35 artists consulted in the preparation of this
article, about 60% prefer working with this device, which comes under the trade names of Wacom, Scitex etc
3 ‘Threads’ : an Internet users indexing term referring to topics of collaborative work, including email/forum
discussions, production projects, exhibitions, writings etc
4 Pierre Bézier, a French designer/engineer, invented a method in the 1960s to describe any line by specifying
certain points on the line, and handles that control the segments between the points. Any shape can be defined
with just a few of these points, far fewer than the number of dots that a bitmap representation (pixel-based)
requires to make the same curve.
5 Mike Leggett, Thinking Imaging Software, Photofile #60 2000, ACP, Sydney.
6 Harold Cohen, Off the Shelf, pp 191-194, The Visual Computer, 1986, Springer Verlag.
7 Stanford University, c.1973.
8 Harold Cohen, ‘The Further Exploits of AARON, Painter’, Stanford Humanities Review, 1995, UCSD.
9 http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/
10 John Tchalenko, ‘Free-eye Drawing’, 2001, Point #11, Surrey Institute of Art & Design, England.
“Finally, 1996 witnessed a major event: a national institution, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, organised …. the first international exhibition of digital works of art on CD-ROM….” Bertrand Gauguet; Rennes Ecole Beau Artes Review.
Burning the Interface
Burning the Interface<International Artists’ CD-ROM> exhibition at the Museum Contemporary Art, Sydney, curated by Mike Leggett and Linda Michael for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March – July 1996. Catalogue sections and notes for talks at Art Gallery of WA and PICA – downloads attached.
Sponsored by Apple Computer Australia, touring Australia, with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission, to Njapartje CMC, Adelaide 12th September – 5th October 1996; Experimenta, CCP Gallery, Melbourne 7th – 23rd November 1996; Perth International Festival, (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art), Perth 12th February – 9th March 1997; Brisbane City Hall Art Gallery and Museum 27th March – 3rd May 1997.
Journal article for Media Information Australia see Texts.
The project began in the 1970s whilst living in the Devon countryside, responding to the sculptural qualities of a found wooden object and the sculptural possibilities of the photographic image. Two exhibition installations (Bristol 1984), Tales Gates and Plank Points, were completed in the 1980s using some grant funding for the construction of the frames and mounting surfaces. In Tales Gates, three frames are hinged to the wall and are able to be moved by the viewer. In a later version shown at Experimenta (Melbourne 1989) a video component was placed facing the panels.
CATALOGUE notes
Tales Gates; and Plank Points – The Project
Work commenced on these pieces in 1973 and arose through, as it were, asking fundamental questions of photographers and photography — questions which for some years, to that point, had been posited within a discourse generated largely by film-makers, a debate developing consistently and rigorously around the means and function of representation as a system of signification within the wider social context.
Some of the questions raised did not lead anywhere; many crossed over with other practitioners’ debates in art history, modernism, psychoanalysis and linguistics; many led directly into other, unexpected areas; some are still being pursued today, though perhaps less consistently.
At the same time organisational advances were made in areas directly related to independent film production, such as in the distribution and exhibition of product, and the educational projects associated with the production and use of the photographic image on motion picture film. Altogether the welter of activity was responsible for an extraordinary surge of non-institutionalised film-making and film-viewing throughout the regions of Britain, crossing many interests and many practices, with varying involvements in theoretical discourse, which among the practitioners of photography at that time, with a few notable exceptions but certainly from photography itself, was visibly absent.
A Biography
A vocational training in photography provided the background for many of the film projects undertaken and indeed certain of the films, such as VISTASOUND and EROTA/AFINI incorporate photographs and photography. Parallel to the completion of various film projects between 1973 and 1979 a range of photographic experiments was commenced and the two pieces in this exhibition are the largest of this work. Tales Gates was commenced in 1973 and completed in 1984, the places being visited, the prints being made at different points throughout that period. Similarly, Plank Points was commenced in 1974, the original negatives being worked with in various ways at different times until completion in 1980.
The extended production period, (and the reference to it in the work itself), was partially determined by the circumstances of organising the time and resources outside various film projects and work in other mediums.
Questions
The viewpoint of the producing photographer, as work progressed, was neither slavishly following nor seeking to prove a number of definitions or conceptions prepared in advance of the progression, which might simply pose, or less so appear to answer, a range of abstracted questions. The conditions which affect the viewpoints of producer and spectator alike, which could be described as transactions or mediations as they arise from their respective viewpoints, assume a desire to be active in encountering the artefact which emerges, to make meaning from various layers of presented photographic and material evidence, to construct an order by which these are related to the Subject(s) of the photograph or the photographic presentation. It is this area of the post-photographic and the presentation of the photographic image that can make more visible the transactions which occur with the photographer. Although, this cannot restrict the making of other meanings from each wholly subjective viewpoint. For the purpose of this note the transactions can be categorised into a diagram [attached] which will indicate the various axes around which the issues raised by this work will probably turn.
South West Arts Award received in 1980 for the completion of the above project: £150.
An interactive multimedia prototype of PathScape was developed in 1999/2000 with a small team of which I was project leader, in association with the Australian Film Commission. The prototype has an interface and navigation system giving access to ‘narratives’ by their association with a specific place or location or series of locations. The taxonomy is represented with images of contiguous cinematic space – individual photo images are pixilated to produce apparent motion in a forward direction, perceived as a movement ‘into’ the space recorded, a landscape. The movement is achieved by gesture, using a mouse in the prototype. The project led to further research and the development of the Mnemovie engine later in the decade. There are several articles about the project: the PDF on this page is extracted from and description and reflections on the project during later PhD research. There is also a book chapter Strangers on the Land – Place and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (2008), and the paper Towards a metadesign approach for building indigenous multimedia cultural archives that preceded it. Earlier papers include: Pathscape: Indexing Audio-Visual Media (2005) and PathScapes – Interface Options for Visual Indexing (2003)
The article introduces and reprints an essay in the catalogue to Burning the Interface