David W. Speck

MA Visual Arats: Printmaking 2011

Camberwell College of Arts

My MA research project examined the visual and procedural languages involved in the making of art with modern technology. I aimed to draw attention to the significant parallels between those languages and Conceptual art practice. From this I hoped to challenge two notions of automatic art (that a machine can create art by itself, and that machine produced work is not art) and explore the art making methods that resulted from my understanding of those languages.

The work presented in the final exhibition arose from an inability to fully visualise and describe an object of simple triangular form. This exercise was prompted by George Brecht's 1961 score Two Exercises which contains the instruction to "Consider an object." I had originally intended to produce two drawings on copper plates for intaglio printing. In the end I had to create the object itself, without drawings, in welded steel angle. Once I had done this I was able to measure and describe the object and use this description along with measurements of the space it inhabited to create a computer model. The model enabled me to view the object in two-dimensional form thereby overcoming some of my initial difficulty in describing it. The model was used to produce the drawings on a pen plotter modified to work directly on an etching ground applied to copper plate. The plates were etched and printed. This method was chosen so as to reproduce (as opposed to simulate) the lines of the object.

The description, model and drawings are all approximations each limited by the form they are expressed in. Despite my best efforts none of them are capable of fully describing the object hence the inclusion of its existent steel form in the exhibition.

以上信息源自伦敦艺术大学，仅作资讯分享。