John Rimmer University of Derby
Repetition Within My Practice-based Research
Stream: Repetition and Technology

            'Can the co-opting of methodologies and strategies found within painting be successfully combined with computer aided digital technologies, to contribute and illuminate the debates surrounding an understanding of the self in a progressively digitised context?'

 I have included above the working research question for my thesis, as there are some aspects of my doctoral practice-based research that relate to this conference theme of repetition, and that contribute to my sense of ambivalence towards digital technology. It also indicates a significant move in my practice as a painter (and I will be speaking to you throughout as a painter), from employing the canvas frame as an arena to act - to paraphrase Rosenberg, to using the screen as a place for investigating image making and also painting's locality.

Fig. 1 is an example of painting on canvas that typifies much of my work using the traditional media of paint and canvas, what is now referred to as an analogue approach to image making. The shift in my practice from the hard, dirty, materiality of paint, to the ephemeral, virtual space that is digitally processed through graphic software has been influenced by two main factors:

Firstly: My engagement with how the Self is constructed has been a focus for my practice informed through an interest with particular problematic related to structuralist bipolarity, and in particular the relationship between agency and language. Terry Eagleton describes it:

...as subjects from inside a reality which we can never fully objectify, which encompasses both 'subject' and 'object', which is inexhaustible in its meanings and constitutes us as much as we constitute it.
(Eagleton, 1983:62)

Derrida constructed the term 'différance' as a method to acknowledge a similar tension between structure and agency, and in doing so illuminating the reflexive qualities that require a preservation of these notions in order to dispense of them. The notion of Self applied for my initial position is informed through [post]structuralist writing. If we locate this understanding of the self historically by introducing an increasingly ineluctable digitised society to this description, then the field of enquiry starts to become even more circumscribed. Indeed, the cultural phenomena of the exponential rise in the use of digital technology throughout the visual world and everyday life, has been alluded to and illuminated through the writings of many authors[1], but despite this documentation, the pace and rate of increase that the digital is having on society remains quite astonishing.

It is the shifting from definite polarised positions and either/or dualities, such as public/private, mind/body, to a more indefinite, fluid state, that initially led me to engage in the materiality of oil paint as a means of investigation. These issues still remain central to the work that has been re-located into different digital media that have a potential for plasticity and enable a visceral approach in production. So whatever the exact 'reality' that Eagleton purports to is; it resonates as much, if not more so, in the visual exploration through the context and application of digital technologies, as it does for a practice rendered through traditional painting.

Secondly: both the decreasing cost and the multi-fold increase in capacity of both digital software and hardware, enables artists to engage in types of production that, until recently, have been largely unimaginable or unavailable. The development of graphics products that enable the manipulation of moving image hitherto only being possible through production studios and educational institutes is now more readily available for interested practitioners. The price of computers with the required spec to operate graphics programs continues to fall, and versions of graphics software such as After Effects, Final Cut, Premiere and Motion are becoming increasingly available in one form or another. It is these kind of graphics software that enable a visual enquiry of video ‘as painting'.

At the very core of computer generated imagery there exists at a basic level, a sequencing without which digital technologies and media applications could not function. This is the structure of binary codes. It is the repetition of zeros and ones that create, translate, transform and reproduce information through groups of eight (bytes) strung together.[2]

01110010 01100101 01110000 01100101 01100001 01110100 00001101 00001010 01110010 01100101 01110000 01100101 01100001 01110100 00001101 00001010 01110010 01100101 01110000 01100101 01100001 01110100 00001101 00001010 01110010 01100101 01110000 01100101 01100001 01110100 00001101 00001010

This particular binary code this sequence translates to a simple sentence such as - My name is John Rimmer. This configuration of digits can only carry meaning if certain patterns are adhered to and are indeed repeatable. It is through this repeatability that meaning can only be communicated, and this process is replicated at the level of structural linguistics and the everyday use of words.[3] The binary remains the starkest and economical manifestation codes, and the potential use of it is far ranging. Indeed the early manifestation of the Turing Machine devised by Alan Turing just prior to the Second World War has provided a model for debating philosophical debates on: mind-body, artificial intelligence and mental states.

As well as meaning and communication being reliant on the repetition of particular character, the building blocks of matter and the structures of organisms also require a repetition that creates patterns, sequences and codes:

            atgctaaaac taatcgtccc aacaattata ttactaccac tgacatgact ttccaaaaaa
            ttttttaacc aaatcaacaa caacctattt agctgttccc caaccttttc ctccgacccc
            ctaacaaccc ccctcctaat actaactacc tgactcctac ccctcacaat catggcaagc...

The four characters G-T-A-C can run in a sequence that goes over forty pages, representing a single tiny part of an organism. It is sequences like this that ultimately constitute our body. This coding has appeared as a motif in some of my practice. Fig 2. Is an example of where I have used laser-etching technologies and painting. I have used the genetic sequencing as a device to render spatial perspective and form, but here use the text to facilitate drawing. The etchings are typically shown in a series of maybe five or six pieces, they register a sequence and are themselves rendered through the application

of binary coding in the digital software and the hardware of the laser-cutting equipment.

Moving back to binary codes, and moving from the written word to imagery such as a television advert, it is difficult to comprehend the total amount of pages of zeros and ones that are required to communicate a single picture. It is the digitisation, or sampling of images through graphic software that allows for the possibility of limitless manipulation and pliability in rendering an image. TV advertising has become ever more sophisticated and spectacular through digitisation and creates a hyper-reality far exceeding the products being sold.

The appropriation of televisual advertising and other found source materials that pervade the airwaves and web, and that are widely consumed, provide the source material for my practice. The material of busy, physical public spaces referred to in my earlier work has been replaced with virtual social spaces generated by and through digital media. Both my etched paintings and video pieces processed through digital technology are based on digital source materials that are transmitted through digital media being constantly circulated and repeated. It has recently been observed that advertising’s traditional use of the 'catch phrase'/strap line is being dropped, and replaced with TV ads that compete and integrate with programmes more directly. They are having to become more sophisticated and flexible in their strategies but still rely on a repetition of sophisticated audiovisual content to compete in the market.  It is through the new powers and economy of production, as well as new media contexts such as the web, Pod casts, and communications devices made possible by and use of digital technologies that facilitate the change. Advertising increasingly occupies the gap between public and private, it lights up our living rooms, it is moulded onto the objects of our desire, it is weaved into our shirts and underwear, and it drip, drip drips on to our unconscious. Advertising embraces the power of repetition as artists employ it to create structure and meaning.

The painting Telephone Sales Fig.2 uses digital technologies in the laser-cutting process and also employs wet media. The genetic code is formed into shapes and then the stencilled layer is immersed into the ground painting allowing the under-painting drawing to seep through. The under-painted image is worked from an advert and is mostly blocked out by a black rectangle. The black space has been recovered as a motif within the paintings in response to its extended use in the video work. The use of what is in effect a black ground in the videos operates as a kind of space that allows events to occur (and mostly recur), but also signals a nothingness. This as well as other visual devices, have emerged out of my visual research involving a continual cross referencing between video and painting strategies, and contextually through a particular debate between Michael Fried and the Minimalists[4].

The book The Shape of Time; Remarks on the History of Things by George Kubler had an influence on Robert Smithson formulating Minimalism. The book generated debate and illuminated issues relating to Minimalist practice in the nineteen sixties regarding times and seriality. Kubler wrote about the nature of actuality and he described it as being:

            'when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instance between ticks of the watch: it is the void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening'.
(Kubler 1962 p17 )

Kubler's poetic description of actuality feels appropriate when looking at the repetition of letters, numbers, and any other sequences of data that can form meaning. Although Fried and the Minimalists explored aspects of time and duration within the confines of sculpture and painting (Fried is ambivalent to the status of film), the imagery of 'when the lighthouse is dark between flashes' has a particular resonance when working with digital video, and echoes the use of frames and frame rates in the construction of a 'movie'. This notion of actuality, or presence is interpreted through Derrida’s supplement and différance as ‘…neither a presence nor an absence.’ (Derrida 1976 p143). It is clear that it is the quick repetition of frames at 24 or 25 fps, which differentiates video from photography and painting - The duration of the work. Through digitisation, video now can more easily embrace aspects of repetition found in painting: collage, mark making, and the all-over, whilst maintaining duration.

Co-opting these visual devices associated with painting into video effects should not only challenge the behaviour of the author of the work but should also question how the viewer experiences it. This is due to the boundaries between different disciplines becoming ever more elastic and permeable soaking up new elements of enquiry. Two important such elements that 'video as painting ' add are: duration and audio - both of which are open to repetition in the form of looping. The structuring of loops within a piece mitigate against a narrative resolution whilst retaining the condensed infinity of painting. What is lost on the screen is the physicality or materiality of paint, but that kind of haptic experience can be reconfigured through sound and motion. Within the video the repetition of zeros and ones enables different degrees of figuration and abstraction, layering, collage, appropriation, erasure, drawing, illusionism, optical effects, colouration, tracing – co-opted from painting. It also allows the passage of time to be fractured through slow motion and reversal and the repetition of clips, co-opted from filmmaking.

Since working with the computer, the screen and digital technologies and approaching video 'as painting', I have veered from being seduced by the power of image making via digital technologies, being in awe of the incredible possibilities; to a tired loathing of that same enormous power and an increasing stranglehold that these digital technologies have.

In shifting area of study within the field of painting from 'paint as paint- juicy, viscous, dripping, fat-', to video as painting and employing a digital toolbox in a virtual space, the exploration of the reflexive relationship between agency and structure becomes played out through the act of making, done through the technological materiality of the media and also the object of its theoretical and historical context. In working within the strictures or structures of digital technologies to explore the impact of digital culture on agency, the question remaining is whether working with digital technology is dirtier than working with oil paint, old rags, and turps.

Eagleton T. (1983)  Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Fried, M. (1998) Art and Objecthood Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Kubler, G. (1962) The shape of time: remarks on the history of things. New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press

Plant, S. (1997) Zeros and Ones, London: Fourth Estate

Derrida, J (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press