The Pursuit of the Unique in the Digital Era

In this paper I aim to explore the relationship of the artistic practitioner with both traditional technologies (the pencil, the brush, the tube of paint) and with mechanical technologies (the printing press, the half-tone screen, the computer). In turn, this relationship results in the one-off artwork and the print, “an identification or mark on a surface left by the pressure of a thing in contact with it.” By unravelling this shifting relationship over the span of some sixty years, I will question whether technological innovation within the arts truly replaces one method of production with another, the consequence of which might be seen as a process of erasure, or whether old and new technologies buffer against one another and combine in a constantly shifting relationship, with one volatile, creative and unpredictable agent at their helm – the artist. I will explore this field by citing the theories of the critic Walter Benjmain and the curator Pat Gilmour, by discussing the impact of digital technologies, by looking at the work of established artists and recent art school graduates and by sharing developments involving a mass drawing project at a London art college that embraces both the digital and the analogue. By doing this, I will endeavour to pinpoint whether theories in relation to this subject have occured as predicted, or whether stranger and more unusual results have ensued, thereby creating a new set of problems for the contemporary artistic practitioner to embrace.