Tuesday 24 May 2016

Up close and far away. The macro and the micro.

Hand made drawings are when looked at from a very close up position, just a field of marks. But the nature of this markfield is essential to an understanding of the drawing as a whole. Not only does the mark quality and handling tell a story, but the concept of a mark field being something that comes together as an identifiable entity when you see it from a distance, is itself fascinating. You can think of this situation as being rather like what happens when you begin to examine something with various powers of magnification. Look at the video 'Powers of ten' and it clearly articulates how levels of magnitude allow us to think about how scale and 'look' are relative concepts that depend on moving our conceptual framework beyond our 'normal' ideas of size, a normality that is based on a particular understanding of ourselves and our relationship to our immediate environment.

From 'Powers of 10'

Powers of Ten

In this video the figure lying on the grass represents our 'normal' scale, but when the camera focuses on the hand, then looks at the skin and then goes into the structure of the molecules and eventually individual atoms, you realise that 'reality' is all of these things and that the superficial surface is deeply dependent on what lies beneath.

Rembrandt self portrait: Etching

Rembrandt detail

Van Gogh

Look at the close up of Rembrandt's etched drawing. The lines are both a sign for hair and a tonal value that begins to give shadow to the face. Different weights of mark are brought together to fuse the two aspects of hair texture and shadow into one. Now in your mind's eye stand back and look at a Van Gogh drawing, dots and lines operate freely as themselves and as textural equivalents for foliage. Both drawings can be seen as fields of marks, but Van Gogh's 'signature' or hand gesture is different to Rembrandt's. With both however the further away you are from the drawing the more it will 'look' like an image of a face or a landscape. You can think of this as a coming in and out of focus, or as drawing as a particular physical type of encounter. As you step towards and away from a drawing you are getting very different perceived sensations from it.
The difficulty in exploring magnification on a computer screen is closely related to these issues. If you look closely at the screen it pixilates out. The Rembrandt detail in particular is beginning to disintegrate because the resolution is only 72dpi.  
The concept behind Debra Weisberg’s tape drawings relies on this effect.



Debra Weisberg: Tape Drawing

As it states on her website, 'On a macro level one can read the explosion of the cosmos; on a micro level it looks like a magnification of neurons transmitting impulses of energy'. She is making an explicit reference to the way we can read marks in relation to changes in scale. As we step back from her tape made drawings gradually we lose sense of the fact they are made of tape and begin to read them as something else.

However we can think about 'what lies beneath' in different ways. Scientists have reasoned that what everything actually consists of is energy vibration and this can be visualised in a mathematical or geometric format.



These harmonics are not only beautiful but relate to the way other things such as DNA structures are organised.

The close up below of the surface of a drawing is fascinating. We don't know what it is a representation of, but we already begin to think about what it could be. Could it represent the surface skin of an animal, or is it a landscape?  So the other issue is about image potential, as an image comes into being, the drawer sees the surface both close to and as they place the image away from them to see it clearly as a whole, at a distance. This working between distances is something students are always advised to do. "Step back away from it and see what is actually happening", is something you will hear over and over again during the course of an average life drawing class. But you could be missing a trick, what if the closeness to the surface was allowing your invention to unfold? 

Detail of a graphite drawing on watercolour paper

When you look at the molecular level close ups in 'Powers of 10' you cant tell these come from a hand, they could be of any organic or inorganic object, it's only when you get to the skin level that you can sort of guess it's from a human. At this level of magnitude it's as much about the paper surface as it is the graphite hardness or softness. Things are brought down to their material essence rather than their ability to represent something. Once again we have a change in focus, not only literally but metaphorically.

The artist Tim Head had explored this close-up world in relation to digital and print technology. He refers to 'the digital medium's elusive material substance'. He strips back the screen image, or digital print to the pixel or dot and uses these basic elements to make works that reveal the illusory nature of the digital.

Tim Head

Tim Head

Keith Peters

Keith Peters is an artist that uses code to deal with these issues. The code can be seen as the micro and the resultant images as the macro. You can explore these types of ideas by following artists that deal with generative art, i.e. artists that often by using computer software, begin to build large worlds from tiny units. This area of thinking was introduced to the mainstream by the popularity of fractal mathematics. You can see how the process works by looking at the diagram and animation below of Koch Curve generation.


Think of looking at a coastline. If you try to measure it from a map you will get one result, but as you increase the size of the map you will see more and more indentations, as you measure these the coastline measurements get longer and longer, as you get to a one to one correspondence with the actual coastline, the closer you look the more complex it gets, you begin to have to measure around every single pebble, and as you get ever closer around every crystal that makes up the stone and every molecule, atom, quark etc. A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale. The important issue here being that it allows us to think about the macro and the micro as having an indexical relationship. (Charles Peirce developed the concept of indexicality as a way of describing the direct relationship between one thing and another, such as a photograph and the thing that was photographed)
An example of these issues are the very large scale Nazca drawings in South America.

Nazca lines photographed from an aircraft

Nazca lines ground view

It is only possible to get an idea of what Nazca lines look like from an aircraft, at ground level they are still very effective but your experience of them is totally different. Once again this opens out possibilities for thinking about things made to be seen from one point of view, in this case I presume it would have to have been the viewpoint of a God. This begins to remind me of anamorphic projections and similar illusions, and as this is a slightly separate issue more to do with position in space than closeness and distance , I'll reserve my thoughts on this for the next post.

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