CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
James Faure Walker, Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London
Machines, Drawing and Vision
What anyone actually ‘sees’ depends on what they are doing, where they are going, and what they expect to see. To sketch a busy city centre with pencil and paper can mean filtering away all that matters – and it makes you conspicuous. A cameraphone can catch the moment, and record the sounds, but this may not count either as ‘drawing’ or ‘seeing’. If you stand still, and observe the flow of pedestrians and traffic, you notice people are navigating without really attending to their surroundings – except for tourists, who experience ‘the sights’ on flat-screens on cameras. Overhead, cctv cameras record everything they can. Cyclists navigate focussed on a spot thirty feet ahead. Commuters are lost in iPods. Everyone, and every gadget, edits the scene to fit their purpose. Drawing is no different: you see what you are conditioned to see by force of habit and the materials you use. Perhaps drawing with a pencil has become too archaic to deal with Leicester Square.
For the most part, strict observational drawing has retreated from the busy spectacle, confined to the measurable conditions of the studio: the static model, ‘traditional’ materials, with no new technology at all. Life drawing is its gold standard. In the nineteen thirties drawing ‘outdoors’ was the fresh-air antidote to the rule-bound studio (‘outside drawing’ was still on the art school curriculum in the nineteen sixties). Today Wacom tablets, scanners, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Maya, all extend the scope way beyond the ‘drawing studio’. Yet they do not require you to observe with your own eyes. You manipulate photos, lines or forms. What you observe, what you engineer, is the drawing itself. No problem for the abstract painter.
Can we speak of a ‘digital way of seeing’? Now that digital devices are ubiquitous, does it make any sense to speak of ‘digital drawing’? Anthologies of drawing include anything from map-making to raindrops on paper, but liberal-minded commentators hesitate over digitally assisted drawings – as documentary evidence they seem unreliable. This paper steps back and looks at drawing methods popularised from the 1900s on, when airbrushes, rulers, cameras, came into the reckoning. Some ‘modern’ methods emulated the machine, the diagram, others analysed the drawn line. Elsewhere faith persisted in the timeless values of ‘good drawing’. Who is actually looking at the so-called ‘world’? It is a familiar dichotomy.