Minjeong An: Drawing with a computer

Minjeong An is an artist who draws using computer technology. Her images rely on Illustrator, PhotoShop and other software skills to give them scientific conviction which she uses to wonderful effect. She combines the collecting of facts and data, with an interest in her own family and a care for ancient traditions that are passed on down from generation to generation. An image such as 'Mother's hand and the wind of healing', bringing together intimate family relationships, tales and stories told by her mother; with an attempt to scientifically measure the effects of a mother's caring contact. The hand in her images is the hand that touches and passes on the feelings of intimacy and love that we have for others and Minjeong An seeks to understand this in terms of interpersonal space, of sensitivity to touch, warmth of feeling associated with actual warmth of skin. The pressure of touch that a hand exerts differs when one is angry to when you are happy, and in the case of a hand involved in caring, that touch can be extremely delicate and sensitive. Fingertips are more sensitive than palms and they are more sensitive than knuckles. 

Shamans have stories and tales about the whistling up of healing winds. They tell of how to work with certain carefully selected winds and breezes for healing and transformation; Minjeong An also taps into these ancient traditions, her mother like my own grandmother, representing the ancient roles of 'wise women' or diviners, the holders of old knowledge, that is passed on from mothers to daughters, from generation to generation. 

The Study on Mother's Hand and Wind of Healing , mixed media, 130.3X193.9cm

From neuroscience news

Thermal sensitivity

Touch sensitivity

Minjeong An uses data in the form of visual diagrams as in the illustrations above and below, to give a certain scientific gravitas to her drawings, but she is also interested in invisible forces; stating that 'invisible love' is administered via her mother's hands.  It is, she further states, as if we are bathed in an invisible wind by an invisible fan. There are diagrams and types of x-ray and thermal imaging technology that reveal invisible data, such as weather maps and heat distribution and she uses the form and symbolism of these types of images to indicate such things as emotional change in relation to degree of love. 

Isobars on a weather map

Thermal imaging

Visual languages are used throughout society, including religious disciplines, the image below, 'Light language from the lyran anuhazi elohei elohim pink ray of divine love', was taken from the Rays Of Lyra - Plasma Body Activation Sequence, a spiritual soundtrack, which is typical of digitally produced artwork that supports spiritual reflection. Sacred geometry being central to Islamic and Christian symbolic conceptions of their respective world views. In this case it is the gravitas of geometry that gives these more religious ideas conviction. 

Light language from the lyran anuhazi elohei elohim pink ray of divine love

She uses her own work as a type of self healing votive, telling us that her experience of developing "Mother's hand user manual" helped to heal her own hurting stomach.
Regarding emotions as precious, she feels they are easy to overlook in a world that is controlled by capitalism and materialism, and she hopes that by working in this very controlled and at first sight very logical way, that she can convince us to follow other more spiritual paths. 

I was also reminded when looking at her work of astrological charts, the idea that the positions of the planets on the day of our birth being somehow an important factor in the development of our personalities, is still for many people an important way to think about how to navigate the daily round of living.

An astrological chart

The Study on Mother's Hand and Wind of Healing , mixed media (Verso)

Minjeong An has said, 'In trying to express the vitality and presence of the invisible, I employ objective verification methods such as mathematical and scientific factors, which are considered to be more convincing in a general sense'. She is also interested in what she calls 'trifles', those little things that pass us by but which perhaps are essential to our wellbeing. You can get a much better idea of her work by looking at the YouTube videos below.

Minjeong An

Diagram of Somulance

In her digital print 'What is vital for Cultivating Sprouts' she looks at how human beings need to extend care out into the world if they are to preserve and cultivate it. She draws on her father's experience in order to explain how care is central to how we water and feed the plants that in turn feed us.

What is vital for Cultivating Sprouts

I first came across her work when I was researching how to align my own work with the principles of permaculture; something I'm still working on. Some people I have spoken to see her work as graphic design, which I think is to be totally confused by the processes of production. Just because she uses software often used by designers doesn't mean she is driven by the concerns of a commercial artist. All the visual arts professions draw, but not all drawings are fine art or design concerns. In fact I think the old divisions between design and fine art are ripe for revision, and the new generation of visual artists out there are working across all available niches in an effort to make their vision reach as many people as possible and survive financially. This is not new, when you read Michelangelo's letters you realise he was working across all the sectors available to him at the time, yes making paintings and sculptures, but also working as an architect, odd job man painting images on shields, over doorways or on furniture, basically if it brought in money he could do it. 

So don't discount computer software when you come to explore you own image development, it adds to your armoury immeasurably and if you develop the skills to a high level, you have a transferable set of tools that might mean that you can survive the harsh reality of an economic downturn, when someone else cant. In my own work when exploring how to visualise tinnitus I have also at times used computer software and I don't worry about moving between analogue and digital resolutions. In fact because some of my work is only seen online, it is often the digitally made images that stand up best to being scrutinised on screens simply because they were made on screens. 

Digital image from a project exploring how to visualise tinnitus

See also:

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Computer aided design posts

Permaculture

Drawing and wellbeing

Between art, geometry, emotion and science

Drawing as abstraction and notation 

Mathematical shapes of interest

Drawing: Analogue and digital processes

Rauschenberg: Image transfer drawing

I'm often questioned as to whether or not I see digital image development as being less authentic or of less value than a hand made image. I work between the two so perhaps I ought to unpick my thoughts on the issue in relation to the work I'm currently involved with. 

I am of an age whereby the computer came into my life quite late. I had already been working as an artist and teaching art for a while, and when they emerged as a possible tool for making art, because I was a printmaking tutor, the first two AppleMac Classics that the college brought came to me and I began to use them as printmaking tools. Because of this, I have always regarded the two dimensional possibilities that various computer hardware and softwares provide as being simply technical processes, just like etching or silkscreen and have never worried about whether these are images for screen or for final print output. As a printmaker I was very aware that changing paper stock changed how a colour would read and the fact that screen colour would sometimes need to be re-calibrated, meant that just like paper, screens could affect how a colour was read. If you are a printmaker you are always interested in how a shift in technology shapes outputs. For instance a change in acid will affect the bite of an aquatint or a different mesh size the way the ink sits on a silkscreen print.  The images below are all from recent work, all of which I regard as an extension of the print process, but because they have a digital form, I also see them as being made for screen viewing. These images have been processed by various technologies and most importantly as far as i am concerned, the imagery relies on my ability to draw and make certain marks using pens and inks, brushes and paints and a variety of other tools to create forms and textures. By grounding my work in these analogue processes I'm very aware that my body and its traces are central to how images develop. However I also see computer hardware and software as being extensions of our bodies, but these extensions are harder to grasp in terms of physical traces. It is very easy to see the mark of an artist's hand movement in the way a drawing is made with charcoal on paper, but much harder to see traces of the human in the proportions of a screen or the invisible code written to form a colour-shape. But these things are all the product of humans, just as much as an arm swinging an ax. The computer allows me in particular to explore colour possibilities. I can develop very controlled palettes for  an image, and in doing so find an unexplored colour sensibility, which can surprise and offer totally new thoughts as to the emotional range that colour can produce. The computer aided images below come from two related but different groups of artworks. The top two are reflections on different feelings or sensations that I have had within my own body, my somatic awareness or interoception of an event and the bottom two are concerned with how perception and interoception are inseparable and they all began by making drawings in response to a series of visual encounters with other people, (rather in the mode of traditional portraits, but done over time and never from a still or frozen moment) and then the images were reworked in response to extended conversations that opened out my awareness of these people's internal feelings and so they became more to do with representations of an inner psyche or the layering of interoception into a previous visually focused perceptual experience. I. e. how we think visually about inner sensations is helped along by making analogies with things we have seen out there in the external world. These images all begin on paper, with lots of flowing liquids and the use of various applicators. Once they are made, the images are then photographed under moving natural light, so that colour and texture are embedded into tonal movement.  This procedure allows me to develop two bodies of work, that can then be compared and contrasted as to how well they allow me to reflect on and adjust formal qualities in relation to their ability to communicate inner feelings or somatically driven sensations. Sometimes the computer allowed for more distancing, and more reflection; the screen operating in a similar way to the mirror in a painter' studio, it allowing me to see something again and to make very different types of decisions to ones that were made in the immanent moments of the actual experience. The analogue experience of material fluidity allowed for immediate responses to a situation, but the screen based work allowed for a necessary distancing in order to control what was being communicated. The freshness and immediacy of an experience, is very hard to capture but as a challenge it is exciting and hopefully as I continue making these images the process will lead to the development of a coherent language that can be understood by others. 

An inner growth

The covid lung

Portrait of a human with a worry

Portrait of a human with a cough

All the images above were first of all constructed as hand made surfaces, often begun as felt-tip pen drawings, because these water soluble drawings are easily suffused into the layers of inks and other pigmented liquids that I make the drawings with. I can sharpen a form using pen and ink or soften it with a rag or soft brush and then it is finally photographed rather than scanned in and edited in Photoshop. The software allows you to work in layers and control transparency, processes that are vital to image development. You can view very subtle changes being made, as a transparency can be as subtle as one percent, you can turn layers on and off and make decisions as to whether or not to add something in or take something out, and you can take steps backwards and reverse a series of decisions, if they seem to be going in the wrong direction. These things are unique to this method of working and are part of a computer aided artwork's media specificity. What I am not doing is trying to imitate what the analogue working methods can do, each method and process has its own value, and like all encounters with other things, you need to be sensitive to their needs just as much as your own. Whilst on the computer I can work towards print outputs or screen; testing papers by printing off on different types of surface and looking at how images appear on other screens, to ensure that the resultant image is able to be translated across both screen and paper outlets. This method also allows me to open the work out in other directions and I have at times animated the images and added sound to them, once digital, all forms belong to the same world and they can be combined in ways previously unthought of. 

I strongly believe that it is collage that sits in the space between analogue and digital drawing. In particular Rauschenberg's use of image transfer techniques back in the late 1950s, demonstrated how printing technologies and drawing technologies could be fused together. All I am doing is following in his footsteps and fusing the handmade mark with a new technical process. Recent images have used collage techniques alongside drawing processes fusing them together by layering, in a very similar way to how Rauschenberg used the pencil rubbling techniques to both transfer images and draw directly into the surface of his monoprints. 

Recent images linking the architecture of the external world with that of the human body

As to whether or not I see digital image development as being less authentic or of less value than a hand made image? I don't see any difference. But in the world of art and investment I'm sure there will be other very different opinions.

See also:

Computer generated art

Drawing and printmaking

Rauschenberg

Authenticity and Blockchain

Qualia

The problem with data storage

Authenticity and blockchain

Beeple

https://www.beeple-crap.com/

Beeple is the online name under which Mike Winkleman operates. He is an artist that is proficient in a wide range of image making software and he has an aesthetic to his work that could be described as post pop expressionist surrealist collage. I. e. a playful relationship with invention, that is fuelled by collage techniques. I think his work is interesting and worth looking at, but no more so than quite a few other artists. However he has come to be seen as a symbol for the continuing hold of capitalist ideals and the power of the investment market. 

Today Christie’s auction house will become the first to offer a purely digital artwork for sale.  Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS,” is being offered as a unique NFT (non-fungible token) consisting of 5,000 individual images created every day between 2007 and 2021 and posted on the artist’s Instagram feed. Those of you that follow this blog will have become aware over time that I have serious worries about the art market, and have long thought that it skews meaning and value in such a way that it makes it extremely difficult to understand how art can be used to benefit society, or to be a communal resource, if the best of it is priced far beyond the means of the average person. For a while I naively thought that online work might open out a new 'money free' arena from within which artists could operate, but I was not aware of 'blockchain'.  

Noah Davis, a specialist in Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York who is leading the sale, states that, "understanding NFTs is an exercise in abstraction, the actual NFT-based artwork is just a code. It doesn’t exist. It has no objecthood." So we are asked to see this as 'abstraction' and of course abstract art has remained a very good seller on the investment market, so why not attempt to link the abstract nature of code with that of abstract imagery, after all they are all symbolic languages. 

Christie’s will also accept payment for the artwork in cryptocurrency, a coin known as Ether. (The buyer’s premium, a set of fees tacked on to the principal, must still be paid for in dollars.)

This is how Noah Davis describes the situation:

"It’s important to define the artwork itself and the symbol that represents the artwork, separately. The actual NFT-based artwork is truly just a non-fungible token — it’s a long series of letters and numbers that is dropped into a digital wallet. But the symbol that represents the token is the monumental collage that Beeple put together, and one could argue that the token basically implies that this is contained within it. It’s the first 5,000 images from his ongoing project The Everydays, in which every day he makes a new image. More recently, they have been very politically or pop-culturally inclined. But the actual NFT-based artwork is just a code. It doesn’t exist. It has no objecthood. We are not selling a painting to hang on your wall." 

He goes on to state; "You could look at it on your phone, your computer, your tablet, or in virtual reality. Really, the only pre-requisite is a screen that has access to the image." Finally commenting, "There are people who are going to look at this as a volatile marketplace that represents an opportunity for speculation and potentially a windfall down the line. Even though this is probably going to command an extraordinary price, there are people out there who are looking at this as a potential investment opportunity. Then there are people who are looking at this as a radical declaration of philosophy or values or investments in the concept of a future where blockchain technology and NFTs and cryptocurrency become the norm for transacting in the financial marketplace."

So the market driven art world becomes ever more speculative, just like the futures markets that collapsed a few years ago we now enter a world of non-tangible investment, but for what purpose? While we all know that we are failing to look after the planet, we also distract ourselves from this very fact, still looking for investments that might mean that we can get 'loads a money' by being the first to invest in a fast rising stock. 

I have been asked by several students lately as to how to save work if it is to be seen as saleable on line, well now I have the answer, when you have made your digital artwork, publish it directly onto a blockchain in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT).  This makes the ownership, transfer and sale of your artwork possible in a cryptographically secure and verifiable manner.

Beeple set out to make an artwork that was about creativity itself. He was celebrating invention, demonstrating that he could renew himself through imaginative play everyday, and what a wonderful idea that was. But it has now been eaten and consumed by another idea, one that states that everything is subject to commodification and can be sold to the highest bidder. If only Beeple could have been content to gift his work to us as a celebration of our creative possibilities as humans. Not that I blame him, he has to make a living and this is an opportunity that few artists would turn their noses up at. I just feel deep down that it shows us that there is 'something nasty in the woodshed', a hidden something that keeps us from seeing clearly, that distracts us from the real business at hand. 

It is now many years since Suzi Gablik wrote her powerful book 'Has Modernism Failed?' She stated that we needed a renewed moral, social and spiritual dimension to art, and argued for a commitment to socially relevant and spiritually informed art practices. Artists are still working to integrate and entangle the concerns of the environment with and into and alongside their various art practices, but as they do I hope this latest investment news doesn't dishearten them, or make them think that nothing changes. Beeple's patched up giant emoticon, sticks its tongue out in defiance, it rises up out of its construction site like Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’, another monument to the hubris of humankind. 

Pieter Bruegel ‘Tower of Babel’

Tower of Babel’ and Beeple details

Perhaps we will never learn and we are hard wired to take the money and run, but at some point there may be nowhere to run to. 

It would seem that blockchain can prove that there is only one of something and it is that rare one off nature that gives the work its authenticity; even if when made the work was available in infinite variations to all who happened to click on Beeple's site. But Beeple's work is native to a computer screen, look at how easily you can see his image of the patched up giant emoticon, and compare the experience of looking at Bruegal on screen. The Bruegal image is much harder to read, it was designed to be seen as a painting, not as a digital image, so in many ways by showing Bruegal on screen I devalue it, but Beeple belongs on screen, his images' authenticity lies in their native digital construction, which is a process not an object and this is perhaps what annoys me most. Beeple's process is one of engagement with creation, but the selling of the final result as a commodity reduces the process to a thing, a thing that only has one use and that is as an investment opportunity for those already rich enough anyway. 

As an image maker myself, I do though respect Beeple's inventiveness and the fact that his images are out in the world, does mean that others can make use of them. Whoever buys the 'original' can't take the images back out of people's minds. So maybe the most important issue here is that once an image is seen it will be consumed in another way, like food, it will be digested and ingested by all that encounter it, and as such its potential for use increases exponentially as each new viewer looks at it. 

See also:

Collage: Part one

Collage part two

Collage part three
College: part four

Computer generated art and coding

The smiley face

Fat

The argument for NFTs

Virtual space and drawing metaphors