The drawings below were all made freehand, with a basic mouse, no other aid. I call them mouse drawings. At the time I was interested in the possibility of inventing a series (alphabet-like) of protoforms suggestive of different habitats or dwelling places, structured line by line. Like building a skeleton, external and internal. In every case, each individual line whether curved or straight maintains its integrity, is unbroken. All the lines have a definite point of origin and arrival, they are not used as filling. These structures depend on each and every line maintaining its integrity as an individual.
These drawings were made against the resistance of the mouse tool, it was an awkward device to draw with. The drawings are the emergent property of their process, pictopoiesis, though at the time I had not yet coined the word. I was in a rebalancing dialogue with the mouse, as I was constantly being decentered in having to deal with the mouse’s limitations. That was what was very interesting about it it was an adaptive system in action, homeostatic. Though technologically dependent, this creative production was an actively living one. Idea and technique inseparable.
I am now rediscovering these works to clarify how they fit in with the loom/frame of pictopoiesis. So far these drawings have existed only on screen. I have not yet printed them out or displayed them otherwise. They were generated as vector graphics, so scalable up to any size. I wonder how they might best be shown.
So, I placed myself in a technological mode of being with these mouse drawings. I had in mind an idea of the line as a fundamental architectural and structural element. A poetic building material. I wanted to give shape to a series of imaginal forms suggestive of habitats or dwelling places but without corrupting the integrity of the material out of which those forms were made, the individual lines. The process of carefully growing and cultivating each line, one at a time, was the means by which each one was shaped into a definite form without that form having been predetermined at the outset.
My subsequent research indicates that the above musings have resonance with thoughts explored by Heidegger (reference at end of this post). Another of the countless fascinating threads to follow up in all this.
notes: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
see in particular section 3.3 Technology (other sections also relevant): a lot of fascinating Heidegger to read through here.
technical note: images originally generated as vectors so need to use original vector files to enlarge images to any scale, can’t be done with the above as they are jpegs (raster). Use SVG plugin (I have just installed in on WordPress for this blog) to display vector graphic files such as Adobe Illustrator, ie the original files.