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Painting Practice as Network: The interoperability of contemporary painting

This practice-based research re-articulates the correlation between a physical painting and its on-screen image in the context of today’s post-internet painting practice. Since its inception, the term ‘post-Internet art’ (Olson, 2008) has been defined in various ways (Connor, 2015; Kholeif, 2021) in response to the developing relationship between contemporary art practice and the digital network. Despite the ‘opacity’ of the current online environment, in which the context of user-created content is manipulated by social media (Lanier, 2018), paintings are presented and circulated through the online platforms in the form of images, which ‘act and catalyze actions’ (Steyerl, 2021) regardless of the painter’s intention for the works.

I use my painting practice as the central method of this research. I make paintings in the studio and examine both the outcomes and the processes involved. I also re-examine the processes through the lens of ‘computational thinking’ (Wing, 2010) by translating them into a procedural programming language. I use my solo exhibition to lead and evidence the development of an online proxy for a painting in a real-life setting.

The proxy offers the painter a way of building the context of their own work online. To utilise the internet as the ‘ground’ of painting through which to exploit the ‘image power […] derived from networks’ (Joselit, 2013), I refer to Berners-Lee’s (1994) idea of the ‘Semantic Web’, which is a combination of ‘machine-readable Web content’ and ‘automated services’. I adopt metadata schemas, which are, importantly, readable and writable by both humans and machines, as a ‘common language’ and ‘proper standard’ (Haraway, 1991) to construct a ‘joint’ that can ‘accommodate and manage heterogeneous elements’ in a network (Galloway, 2021). The joint, consisting of a painting’s metadata, not only contextualises the painting’s online content available in various formats but also interconnects these into a network, which serves as the work’s online proxy. Working closely with search engines, the proxy enables the interoperability of painting for both the painter and the viewer.

I redefine the painting-canvas as a sensuous interface by which painters can realise the ‘rhythmic unity of the senses’ (Deleuze, 2003). Combining both Ash’s (2015) notion of the interface and Latour’s (2011) notion of the network I construct a conceptual framework – an ‘interface for the network of painting practice’, through which the painter can remap their painting practice as a ‘distributed network’ (Joselit, 2013). Using Galloway’s (2021) idea of ‘holes’ in the network, they can ‘embrace the chaos’ (Deleuze, 2003) of newly discovered and unpredictable outcomes of the painting process.

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