An artist’s sketchbook is one of the most precious spaces for research and experimentation. In its ideal, the sketchbook is an intimate domain where artists capture ideas, test compositions, wrestle with subjects, and scribble marginalia, engaging in an ongoing inner dialogue that audiences don’t witness.
An artist’s sketchbook is one of the most precious spaces for research and experimentation. In its ideal, the sketchbook is an intimate domain where artists capture ideas, test compositions, wrestle with subjects, and scribble marginalia, engaging in an ongoing inner dialogue that audiences don’t witness.
Of course, some of these sketches do eventually make their way to the public, offering new access points for understanding these artists’ practices. From Da Vinci to Rubens, Seurat to Van Gogh, O’Keeffe to Walker, sketches reveal the essence of an artist’s pursuit at a particular moment in the raw — whether or not they ever inform the creation of a publicly presented artwork. They add new textures and tones, deepening context for artists in both personal and professional dimensions.
Sketches are also regarded as a crucial proving ground, a training hall where artists grapple with craft. When a young Degas proclaimed his intentions to become a painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres purportedly told him, “Draw lines. Draw a lot of lines.” Fittingly, Degas would himself later say, “Drawing is the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, [their] true personality.”
Sketches manifest a different kind of honesty; the way a diary entry is honest, the way bedhead is honest. They are intrinsically in-process, always gesturing elsewhere.
In analog forms, sketches are highly correlated with drawing on paper. Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process poses a simple question: what does a sketch look like for an artist working in more experimental modes like digital art and time-based media? What is a sketch when it’s not a conventional drawing?
Whether they take the form of code, video, 3D models, immersive spaces, or multimodal explorations that don’t fit a neat categorization, these “sketches” are no less integral to the development of the respective artist’s body of work. Because of the relative novelty among audiences, the technical and conceptual merits of these process-oriented arts can be difficult to grasp, leaving underlying poetics invisible or misinterpreted. Worse still is the assumption that this work is tantamount to button-pushing, that machines are the true authors — trivializing the years spent developing a unique relationship with these materials.
It is of course the bias of new media curators that new media artists undertake some of the most important creative labors of our time. The argument is simple: these materials are more explicitly related to the general person’s existence than most others. We encounter screens, software, hardware, algorithms, and other such technologies as a matter of routine. To engage these as artistic material is to invoke the core dilemma of the contemporary condition: how does one live a sovereign life when more and more of it is surveilled, constrained, and monetized through the instruments of asymmetrical power structures? The notion of “disruption” has been abused beyond parody in Silicon Valley, but these artists actually are disruptors — subverting and inverting tools to provoke questions rather than return answers. In this way, their sketches create a cascade of insight: regarding the art, the artist, and the new ways we might understand the relationship among ourselves and the tools of our daily lives.
Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process foregrounds these in medias res refractions, offering rare glimpses into the unseen journeys artists undertake with their distinct forms and materials, asking audiences to contend directly with the new literacies that inhere within the arts at the edge.
