Virtual Loops: Deconstructing Painting to Explore the Aesthetics of Mediation

This thesis document outlines the key concepts and research practices I undertook to explore the aesthetics of mediating digital and analog logics through materiality and painterly abstraction. It culminated in a body of work of 8 paintings and a final thesis exhibition from March 22 to April 1 at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. This work builds on my practice as an abstract painter to deconstruct painting and use a site responsive installation method to explore the optical dimensions of borders, boundaries, and surfaces to negotiate between digital and analog logics. This interest in a medial condition coupled with the impact of Covid 19 focused my observational and material research to center around the site and idea of LCD and plasma screens of personal computing devices. The screen mediates between two categories of digital and analog, and in an attempt to study communication loops between these two categories I use digital processes of laser cutters, 3D scanners, and 3D printers as well as analog processes of silicone casting and paint drying to explore different variations of transmutation. The materials I choose are based on visual effect and the relationship with transparency/translucency and opacity/obscuring. Through fusing an expanded painting practice (using flat, painterly elements) with the spatial and sculptural (using the actuality and volume of sculpture) I want to consider the digital as a state of abstraction that is constantly mediated between the analog forms of real. This research draws on the theories of the media archaeology of colour by Carolyn L Kane for my selection of colours and surfaces, Alexander Galloway’s conception of the digital as an epistemological category that exists outside of personal computing devices, and Bernhard Siegert’s notion of cultural techniques to frame the screen as a material technic that reinforces ideas and divisions of digital and analog, while these categories and ways of thinking have long historical precedents.