Poetics Step 1 (Repitition)

STEP ONE: 

Draw digitally.  As realistically as possible.

Drawing digitally is an instruction that seems harder than it looks. I guess I can consider myself a painter (though I don't know how I would rank among other amateur painters). But painting is very important to both Jullien and Lacan, and of course photography and film are very painterly at times.

In this experiment, I will attempt to draw and paint digitally. When conducting this experiment, I urge you to do the same.

Drawing digitally and painting digitally are painful. The click+motion repetition does not emulate my normal brushstrokes. Instead, they are completely new and cause pain that's comparable to handwriting for long periods of time. It's interesting to feel this pain. It's interesting to brush with such tiny movements.

Afternotes: Drawing digitally was a failed attempt. I had to switch to normal pencil drawing. It was difficult to use my computer's trackpad to get control over the shape of what I was trying to draw. It felt like I was trying to write for the first time (which I liken to writing with my left hand) and I couldn't get a hold of the pen right, and so my "letters" were huge, not very pretty, and didn't look how I wanted it to.

Poetics Step 2 (Time/Time-Travel)

STEP TWO

Go back and forward in time.


The production or presentation of time is very important to film studies. It's a contrast, a bit, to Juillien's argument because I think traveling back in time goes against the propensity, the flow, of things (though I guess going back in time could be the propensity). It is a purposeful dam to the flow of the paintbrush, however, to do this. This step involves two parts.

1. Purposefully make at least one mistake to your digital painting. Save it under a different name, and then go back, through the process of Undoing (ctrl+z). The ability to travel back in time is automatically inherent in Electrical productions. Unlike with traditional painting, where starting over or removing painted sections of your piece, is necessary, with digital painting, the stain, the mistake, literally was NEVER there.

2. Count how many steps you are able to go back in time on the specific program you're using.

My version of GIMP - 325+ [I stopped counting] points back in time that I can go.

Afternote: Be careful not to make any changes as you're going back as it will hinder your change to go forward in time to the spot that you had started. Also, note that you can't pick one aspect to go back in time and disregard the rest (a butterfly effect, perhaps?)

Poetics Step 3 (Gap/Montage/Sequence)

STEP THREE:

Save your painting continuously with a different file name.

A part of Electracy that I think is definitely present in our CATTt is the idea of time. Of course, this idea is heavily present in film especially. But time plays a role in both Jullien's text and Lacan's. I would like, for instance (though I'm sure I'm not the first) the archive as a historical tool that was not otherwise conducted with such ease before Electracy generally and the internet specifically.

In painting, one doesn't paint some new draft for every change that is made to the canvas. We can't archive the mishaps or the "happy accidents" that take place because we are consistently painting on the same canvas. We can't possibly think of doing otherwise. It logically doesn't make sense. Of course, some people might take pictures or video of their process, but not a lot of people did.

With the advent of sites such as Youtube, for instance, the time-lapse art project is easily documented, in video form. This too can be done with digital painting, but I think a more interesting process is the continuous saving method.

What this consists of is saving in intervals your painting so that you end up with a folder final product instead of one file. This folder will be filled with the history of your painting. The saving process is a little bit directed by the propensity of the picture itself. Sometimes I saved after just three brushstrokes, and sometimes I saved after a part of the painting was completed.
 

What this allows for is a tri-fecta of information.

The gap: the spaces where saving did not take place. What happened then? Can I remember?
The sequence: self evident. We get a stilted animation of how the painting progressed.
The montage: if the painting is put out of place chronologically, what occurs?

Make a video of this process so that these three parts of the plot can better observed. 


Afternote: I experienced a kind of insane, neurotic need to save after a while. It became a compulsive habit that was actually a part of the painful process of this painting (My hand was hurting as if I'd been writing for longer than was healthy).

Poetics Step 4 (Zooming / Manipulations)

STEP FOUR:

You're done with the painting. Now mess around with it.


Manet's painting of the matador [The Dead Toreador] is a famous work of art that came about because Manet essentially destroyed the original painting of a bullfight. Because of perspective (the bullfighter in the foreground and the bull in the background) critics complained the the immensity of the bullfight was not present (it looked like the bullfighter had been killed by a horned mouse, rather than a magnificent bull). Manet then separated the two images and that's how we get "The Dead Toreador." 

With digital painting, the destruction of a painting does not have to be permanent (See Step 2). Manipulations are important so that one can see different parts of the image that could not be seen before. Zooming, for instance, allows the viewer to get as close as possible to the art, and to do wo without moving themselves. It allows, as Jullien suggests, for the bigger picture to be seen (one can see the whole world) or for close analytical reading to be made.There are three sections of this step.


1. Manipulation: Manipulate the painting in any way that you would like. Remember to save the painting under a different name before you start the manipulating, so that you don't lose the original final product. Do this every time you want to manipulate the painting (this applies to 2 and 3 as well). Try to create photodynamisim.

2. Inversion: Invert the colors of the painting.

3. Zoom in: Pick a section of the painting and zoom in on it to create a whole new composition.

Poetics Step 5 (Gaze)

STEP FIVE: 

Find yourself gazing at your painting/find yourself in your painting.

For Lacan, the gaze is an important part of the psychoanalytic process, for everything and everyone (the street walker, the person being gazed at, the gazer, the analyzed and the analysand). There is always that desire.

This gaze is highly relevant to the cinematic as well. In fact, it applies to the whole CATTt and makes it easy to end my poetics here, to flip the perspective and instead of seeing my project, to see myself seeing my project, to see my project looking back at  me. What can that tell us?

In this process, it is important to do two things: both impose and reveal your own gaze as an artist in whatever means that you can. You can do this by taking a picture of yourself next to your work (a selfie, essentially). You can also do this by taking a picture of your face on the computer screen (this works especially well if you're computer screen is the glossy not matte kind, although a blurry image of you can be made out on the matte screen). A third way is to actually take separate pictures of you and of your work and manipulate them on top of each other. A fourth way is to zoom in on your picture, and find evidence that you were there.

If you look at the blank space, you can see me in this image. Not my face, but the stains I have left upon the canvas. There are two kinds, the circular brush pattern has not been smoothed out, and the pixelation from the camera image I took of the hand drawing is also not eliminated from the picture, thus denoting that this picture was not, in fact, drawn digitally. Who can say that it was painted digitally too (except for the evidence of the paint brush pattern of course). Two opposing elements, then, are present here.

What happens to your image when your focus shifts and you are able to see yourself seeing yourself seeing your painting. How does your position shift when you've gazed upon the gazer? What about the fact that you actually made this painting? How is your painting looking at you? As a bonus step, repeat the methods for imposition or revelation, but ask someone else to do the gazing instead of you.

First Experimental Result [Digital Art/Repetition]

Here is the result of both traditional pencil drawing that came about after the failed digital one and the process of repetition that was so important to my brush strokes.

Second Experimental Result [Gap/Saving]

It's important to note in this result not only what gets saved, but also the actual white/black space that's in between these images. There is an optical illusion that looks like this where the space in between the images flickers and creates a trick wherein you think you see a black circle that isn't there. Do you see that in these images from my experiment?

Third Experimental Result [Sequence]

When images are constantly being saved, they, in sequence, have the appearance of film strips. I think this is an interesting result that occurred when I looked at the images side by side in the file that they were in. It was like I was seeing the history, the birth, of this painting -- sometimes in reverse and sometimes not.

Fourth Experimental Result [Time Travel]

Some of the most interesting instances in this experiment were when I had to turn back the clock on my painting. This happened in several different ways.

The first was when I forgot for a moment my neurotic need to constantly save the painting. When I lost myself in the repetitious act of laying down paint and then blending the product. What I had to do when I wanted to save the images was this: I had to go all the way back to my last save point and then I had to move forward and save whenever I thought it was necessary. It was a dangerous process because there was high risk for seeing imperfections as I went back over every aspect of the image. I had to prevent myself from working on the blemishes because sometimes I had gone way past that point and if I corrected it, all the future work would be gone.

The second was when I needed to imagine something, imagine where a line that I couldn't see had to go. This happened in the first example. I needed to see where the petal would realistically go if it wasn't covered over by another flower. So I painted the path, checked to see if it was correct by outlining it, and then I would go back in time to erase that unnecessary line.

The third is obvious: I did something to the painting that I did not want done. What happened here was an immediate fix because I knew that I did not want the painting to be like what was wrong with it at that point. Sometimes, however, I would have fun with the mistake before I tried to fix it. This can be seen in the second group of pictures, where I made the petal look like an animal leaping.

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Fifth Experimental Result [Montage]

When I uploaded the pictures to my iPad, the results were fascinating. The pictures went out of order and created a montage that was interesting to observe, especially in a slideshow format.

Sixth Experimental Result [Spontaneity]

Painting digitally allows for interesting results and decisions that might have not been made had I been painting in a traditional manner. For instance, the image started out as one flower, then went to two. And it started out with one stem, then it went to two, then went back to one, and then ended up with two, but the second-second stem was in a different location than the first-second stem had been.  It's sometimes hard to see how it could have been any other way than the way it ended up.

Seventh Experimental Result [Desire Neurosis Pain ]

 

  

I think a repetition of the image where all of the files are present is important to demonstrate the kind of psychological neurosis, the physical pain, and the anticipatory desire that I had for this image as I was working on it. It was an interesting experience, one that I've never had while painting with acrylics. In this result, it is true that I am not showing the amount of actual files (those are obviously much less than this), but I am showing the time it felt like it took. Even though I have almost 300 files, I feel like I should have had a lot more considering the time it took. 

Eighth Experimental Result [Manipulation]

Ninth Experimental Result [Macro/Micro (Zooming)]