This work is to explore the static performance of memory in dynamic time. My friend is the protagonist in the photo, and what is recorded is a conversation between me and her about memory. This is the memory of a conversation between me and her from my viewpoint, the expression and documentation of the memory in the present time. For her, it is the experience she recalled in the past, and the memories that happened in the past are recorded through her facial expressions. The feelings you have when you see this work are memories that happened in the future.
Duan, JX. (2021) I think what I think [oil painting].
150 x 140 cm
Camberwell, London
Sort of images of work in a gallery situation
Using the perspective of memory to understand the development of physical and digital painting
Jia Xin Duan
My research is based on memory as the entry point for integrating digital and physical painting, which painting on canvas and the future development of this phenomenon. My core research questions focus on the effect of memory in physical painting and digital painting, how the influence of digital technologies on a painting might be seen as a kind of form of archiving or making memory or ideas or history.
My research focuses on exploring the following questions:
1. How do we use the perspective of memory to understand the significance of incorporating digital media in physical painting?
2. What effect will be integrating physical painting and digital art have on the way memory is expressed and stored in the two art forms?
In addressing this question, I will discuss the construction and storage of memory in physical painting under digital art. I am particularly interested in how digital technology expands the pictorial representation of memories through physical painting.
3. What will be the future development of physical painting that incorporates digital media?
Importance of Using Physical Painting to Archive Memory
Manuel Mathie, The Prophetess (2020)
Magnum, Magnum Contact Sheets
(1930-2012)
I have been looking at Manuel Mathie and Magnum's work to inform my project. Magnum's Magnum Contact Sheets reveals how Magnum photographers have captured and edited their best shots from the 1930s to the present. The contact sheet, a direct print of a roll or sequence of negatives, is the photographer's first look at what they have captured on film and provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into their working process.
In contrast, those physical and spiritual traumas in Manuel Mathie's The Prophetess promises the existence of an imaginary place. In its form of nonlabor, labor remains private and concrete detectable in the concrete reality of its surface and the gestures.
They have shown me that it displays the picture on canvas, condenses and stores up labor time or non-labor time in a very different way from time-based media like film and photography. (Isabelle Graw, 2015) They have archived their memory in images to critique the digital material of images, in particular photographic images.
I am also looking to question how we archive and express our memories in painting in my work. I have been experimenting with different techniques and materials to do that. These experiments are showing on the pages of "Memory hidden in Time," "Physical painting," and "Digital painting."
Research background of physical and digital painting.
There has been an exhaustive discussion of the new phase in physical painting development. According to Walker (2006, p. 204), ‘one of the main changes to traditional [1] paintings in contemporary society is that current programs enable images to be formed and transformed at a speed that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago’. Therefore, artists should worry about the next step of creative painting: Can art be made by intelligent robots? What would "computer-generated" art be like? (Walker, 2006, p. 204) However, little attention has been paid to analysing this phenomenon from the relationship between memory and painting. Memory has two essential functions in visual art and painting: recording knowledge of experience (Gibbons, 2007, p. 17) and creating Pathosformel [2] triggered by emotion.
Firstly, according to philosophers such as John Lock, images in visual art or sense impressions are used to reproduce and recall knowledge frequently (Gibbons, 2007, p. 12), thereby archiving knowledge of visual aesthetics and technique. For instance, The British Museum posted an immersive video on Twitter that explores a beautiful Chinese scroll that contains a painting depicting a forest near Mount Baiyue (now Mount Qiyun) in eastern China. The art piece was made in 1623 by Xiang Shengmo and served as a record of the aesthetics and knowledge of painting in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. However, now it and this painting are presented to us in a brand-new form by new digital technology, once again inheriting and conveying the knowledge of aesthetics and painting in visual art. It demonstrates how recording the memory of art knowledge can be sufficient. My use of westernization and sinicization as the art form has become quite complicated over Unit one, resulting from my greater understanding of them. I learn more about Chinese and Western painting in both materials and techniques and confuse them in my Chess game painting. It references Chinese and Western chess game culture, an example of common memory between China and Western countries. I am now going to follow on with a series of attempts to combine painting. Besides, I want to make a series exploring software art and art game in the rest of the unit.
Secondly, as Schwartz and Cook affirm, artists can use contemporary and traditional painting materials to record their memories (2002, p.18) and convey a painter’s emotion to an audience. Additionally, as Gibbons explains, ‘images in paintings are a knowledge of the past that is more deeply embedded in the psyche and which can be evoked in its complexity, not simply by “snap-shots” of the event but by an everyday experience that manages to key into the whole host of sensations and emotions experienced in the moment or an event’ (2007, p. 194). One such example is the work by artists boychild, Cao Fei, Robin Rhode, yang yongliang, and Sun Xun, who worked for the first time with Tilt Brush (a 3D virtual-reality drawing and painting application) at Art Basel’s Hong Kong show. When these artists create in the 3D virtual world, they have no way to have reference objects, unlike physical paintings. In the 3D virtual world, those artists cannot see things and photos of the real world. These artists can only create with the painting knowledge and feelings accumulated in their past, and they immersed themselves in their VR 3D painting world. Artists who make the painting in a 3D virtual world more truly expressed their emotions in their digital paintings. Through empirical foundations of digital and virtual painting, I start to become an artist (such as Alex Bacon's essay mentioned) who rebuilt painting from the ground up in a quiet but incredibly profound way. As Alex Bacon clarified: "New audience that lacks, indeed does not need, education or background in the critical and formal examination of art and its history. This has led to fundamental changes in the way a painting looks, communicates, and circulates, which has, in turn, attracted a new, younger generation of artists who approach the medium differently than their historical antecedents, deploying it to varied ends. " In the immersive experience of 3D VR virtual painting, I enjoy the sense of feast brought to my creation by the sense of hearing, vision, and "tactile" (the vibration brought by the gamepad). After the outcome, you can also present the creation process with auditory and visual experience in the video form. My whole person is involved in the creative process, including my emotions and thoughts. So I think even if the last virtual painting is undone by one click or "blow up" directly, there should be traces of my memory in this process. And my audiences could enjoy them like me, even if they don't have art knowledge and art history background.
1I define “traditional painting” in the same way as “physical painting,” i.e., a typical painting made by hand by artists.
2 Pathosformel (plural Pathosformeln) is ‘the emotional power of images and how this emotional power persuades viewers to accept specific values or adopt certain practices, or formula of pathos (emotion),’ and it is a key Warburgian concept (Impett and Su ̈sstrunk, 2016)
References
Art Base. (2017). Cao Fei x Google Tilt Brush. Available at: https://medium.com/@Happeningarts/art-investment-in-2018-what-you-need-to-know-c6a750c1982a (Accessed: 24 Jan 2021).
Brothman, B. (2001). Archivaria. In: B. Brothman, The Past That Archives Keep: Memory, History, and the Preservation of Archival Records, 51st. [online] p.1. Available at: <https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12794. (Accessed 24 January 2021)
Gibbons, J. (2007). Contemporary Art And Memory. London: I.B. Tauris, p.12.
Impett, L. and Su ̈sstrunk, S. (2016). Pose And Pathosformel In Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas. School of Computer and Communication Sciences, École Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Mathieu, M. (2020). The prophetess1. Available at: https://www.manuelmathieu.com/my-gallery#3. (17 Jan. 2021).
Schwartz, J.M. and Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: the making of modern memory. Arch Sci 2, p.18.
Walker, J. (2006). Painting The Digital River. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p.204.