INTRODUCTION

Scratch Disks explores painted techniques and latent brush effects that rely on a tactile approach to processing. As a series of painted panels, the project is a virtual catalog of graphic styles that operate amid a crush of gestural strokes and coalesced masses.

Focusing on image making alone, these abstract portraits reflect the direct relationship between the composition and its making. Leveraging this computational relationship, each panel explores illustrated techniques to create compositions that consider network learning systems, an exploitation of processing effects, and digital interference. The features that define these effects operate between the literal and the abstract— as painted actions on a workspace superimposed with distinct imagery and textures. Creating a dynamic trade of image and data, the indirect translation of this information through ‘form drawing’ equips the construction of each panel with digital markings that can be read through scrapes, swipes, and drags. Although the process is digital, this reading is a specifically identifiable feature of a painted aesthetic—one with evidence of tooling in a process that is physically tool-less.

This process can be more clearly described through a contrasting but complimentary method of making, positioning historical painting techniques and contemporary image making in parallel: