Drawing after Digital — curated by Klaus Speidel — Xpo Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 18 → June 18, 2016

Digital technologies have changed cultures, affected our attention spans and provides new food for drive theory. But what happens if digital meets drawing, certainly one of the most archaic techniques of representation? With more than 20 artistic positions on display, the exhibition at XPO systematically (and sometimes playfully) explores the effects of these encounters, trying to understand where and how they interface. Four aspects are particularly important in this context:

1. the use of digital tools by artists, e.g. creating algorithms to generate drawings

2. the ways in in which drawings using pre-digital tools react to processes which are typically digital (such as ordering and reordering, calculating, transposing and, more recently, linking and tracking)

3. the ways in which our lives in digital worlds can affect our interpretations of pre-digital works (such as those of Sol LeWitt and Hanne Darboven)

4. évocation in drawing of practices relying on digital tools (such as sexcams, spam, crowdsourcing…)

Here are some of the questions which get addressed in the show: Is there are graphical poetry of PowerPoint? What drawings do artificial neural networks dream of? What happens if an artist asks “the internet” what to draw? How did digital affect the practice of those who continue to draw like before? And what role can artificial artificial intelligence play in art? Is “photoshopping” a new kind of drawing?

But whatever the themes explicitly addressed by the works in the show, one thing is clear: many of the creations on display will be appropriated, tweeted, tagged, commented on, shared or liked, conveying new meanings and even undergoing visual transformations as they appear on profiles or facebook walls. In a certain sense, the “after digital” dimension of drawing is just one — particularly interesting case — of the influence of the former on the latter and it could be argued that we live in a time where even a marble statue is, in a certain sense, prone to becoming digital.

Klaus Speidel

———

The curator: Klaus Speidel is an art and image theorist. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Sorbonne University and is a member of the Lab for Empirical Art History at the University of Vienna. In 2015, he won the AICA France prize for art-criticism.