Description
AbstractThe act of mark-making is an existential one. It is a way of dropping an anchor, to document one’s existence. Dating back thousands of years, human mark-marking in the form of handprints can be found in caves in many parts of the world, a declaration that ‘I was here!’. As time went on, forms of mark-making have evolved into artistic practice and language. Mark-making reflects our existential curiosity of ourselves and is a response to ‘being’. The act itself is our desire to understand and locate ourselves in the world. Mark-making is an intimate act, as regardless of the type of mark, whether it be text, pictorial, or abstracted, a mark made is unique to the individual creator and expresses their existential presence. With the introduction of the Internet, forms of mark-making have moved online – an act of digital mark-making. This paper examines the notion of digital mark-making through research as creative practice in the form of a series of drawings created with grey-lead pencil on paper (an analogue form of mark-making). This artwork is a continuation of my research interest that explores how creative works, such as novels, films and artworks, can represent today’s virtual-real human experience.
The conceptual concerns of the drawings are informed by the structures, voice, and tone of the Internet. My creative process for these works consisted of first curating social media content of anonymous users that I found on the Internet, then appropriating and re-contextualising the online content into physical textual drawings. The choice to re-contextualise the online content through the physical act of mark-making is to humanise the act of digital mark-making. The drawings themselves replicate the narrative structures of social media through the use of the banal font that is Helvetica, yet the imperfection of my mark-making juxtaposes the flawless nature of digital text creation. These drawings physically actualise digital mark-making back into a traditional act of mark-making using grey-lead pencil and paper. The artistic intention for the series of drawings is to explore the notion of digital mark-making as an expression of existential self. The drawings collectively narrate the current anxiety many people feel due to the existential dread that the Western world is currently going through as it experiences the late stages of capitalism.
In this series of drawings, theories and notions surrounding social media and Internet culture inform the process and outcome of the work. First, this paper discusses how the drawings engage with the ‘small stories’ paradigm, which acknowledge new forms of narratives that don’t fit into traditional understandings of what constitutes a story – that is, a narrative with a start-middle and end. Each drawing gives authority to the posts, tweets, status updates, etc, that are appropriated and re-contextualise, to physically actualise the online content and engage with the social media posts as narratives in their own right. Secondly, this article proposes that the narrative structures of social media fit into Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heterogolssia, which he describes as qualities of a language that are extralinguistic, but common to all languages. While each drawing is a single artwork, exhibited together, they represent the fragmented, heteroglossic narrative structures of social media. The drawings collectively represent the zeitgeist and the existential dread of late-stage capitalism. Thirdly, the article illustrates that these drawings are examples of autobiography through the act of digital mark-making, which exemplifies how people express their identity and make connections with others in today’s hyper-connected media-saturated world. The drawings document how people use social media to make connections with others through performative online content creation. Lastly, the article discusses how the tone of the narratives in the drawings embrace Bakhtin’s (1964) notions of ‘carnival’ and ‘grotesque realism’, terms that describe the dark absurdist humour and socially inappropriate content that is found on the Internet pioneered by hacker culture.
The series of drawings are academic research through creative practice as they apply current theories surrounding the Internet, particularly social media, to examine human-lived experience that oscillates between virtuality and reality. The drawings embrace the language of the internet to conceptually explore how it shares the same function of language offline, namely, that it is not simply a means of communication, but also a place to inhabit where we engage in identity work, build social connections, and construct perspectives of the the virtual and real worlds we live in.
| Period | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 2023 International Conference on Global Cultural and Creative Industries |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Shanghai, ChinaShow on map |