As artists working in divergent disciplines, with David Eastwood’s practice primarily based in the analogue medium of painting and Karen Kriss engaged in the screen-mediated practice of digital animation, the co-authors of this article have entered into a dialogue that both enriches and unsettles our respective understandings of the materials with which we work. The intersection of our practices prompts an investigation of the boundaries between paint and pixel, demonstrating that materiality is mutable and capable of being hybridised through a cumulative process of creative convergence and interplay. Embarking on a creative collaboration that bridges painting and computer-generated (CG) animation, neither of us confines our practice to a single medium. Instead, we work across analogue and digital domains. By working together, we embrace the overlap of each other’s approaches, letting each influence and mutate the other. The collaboration is grounded in a critical rethinking of materiality as an aggregate presence within both physical and digital media, evidenced by the procedural and aesthetic residues of making.

Central to our investigation is Eastwood’s painting Swathe (2023). As an image of drapery, it is, quite literally, a material image. Drapery is an endlessly mutable material. There is a degree of neutrality to a sheet of fabric: it is like a blank canvas, so to speak, in that it lends itself to a broad range of material and visual transformation. When such transformations occur with the aid of digital processes that generate variant iterations via altered code, the term ‘mutation’ seems particularly applicable. In evolutionary biology, mutation occurs because of a change in genetic structure, or biological code, leading to detectable changes in an organism’s observable characteristics.

Art historian Petra Lange-Berndt proposes that computer-modelled materials may be understood as a form of intermateriality, which she describes as ‘hybrid’ or ‘mutant material’.¹ The concept of mutant material, with transmutations of materiality across painting and CGI models, frames our joint project. We are interested in the correspondences to be found between the material facture of a painted image and the rendering of related content in digital formats. The cloth in Swathe originated as a tangible object, was reconfigured as a digital 3D model, and ultimately re-materialised as oil paint on linen. These transformations prompt a comparison between the material facture of a painted image and the rendering of analogous forms in digital space.

Facture as an Animating Force

A key concept guiding our inquiry is facture, the indexical trace of how an artwork was made. We use the term facture as a provocation to think across traditional and digital making. Art historian David Summers observes,

The word ‘artifact’ couples art with the idea of making, or of having been made. ‘Facture’ is from the past participle of the Latin facio, facere, to make or do; it thus has the same derivation as ‘fact’, which might be defined as something evidently done. Understood in this way, ‘fact’ and ‘facture’ are closely related; to consider an artifact in terms of its facture is to consider it as a record of its own having been made.²

Facture then, in recording the way that something has been made, is an animating force, activating a playback function that situates materials in time, taking shape.

The prior cause implied by facture is typically attributed to the hand of the artist. For example, art historian Rebecca Zurier relates the term to ‘an artist’s handling of medium, the brushstroke, how materials are worked descriptively and expressively.’ For Zurier, facture is an index of ‘where the artist’s hands meet the work.’ ³ Similarly, psychologist and artist John Willats defines facture by emphasising the role of the human. He writes, ‘Facture is the term used by art historians to describe the manner in which a painting has been executed, especially as it testifies to the work of human hands.’ ⁴ Prominent in the art historical discourse on facture is the idea that it denotes a human act of creation, primarily pertaining to the handling of physical materials, especially painting. Indeed, the definition offered by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, for example, identifies facture as, ‘A term which came into use in the later nineteenth century to denote an artist's characteristic handling of paint.’⁵ Traditionally, we associate facture with the trace of human gesture.

However, it is useful to think about facture in broader terms, noting that it is the material itself that carries the indexical trace of an artist’s handling. Beyond the emphasis on human activity, the agency of materials is intrinsic to facture. In other words, facture requires a collaboration with materials: paint records the brush’s movement, clay responds to the ceramic sculptor’s touch. But what about digital media? Without tactile, physical materials, can facture play a role in contributing to an understanding of materiality?

Digital processes of creative practice, such as animation and 3D modelling, are sometimes thought of as virtual and, by extension, immaterial. However, the identification of facture can help us understand materiality within virtual contexts. If facture signals how an image came into being, we should be able to speak of the facture of, say, a digital animation. Recognising the various modes of producing and manipulating digital images, artist Chris Worfold observes, ‘the concept of facture may need to be reassessed, presenting new research opportunities’.⁶ Accordingly, this investigation seeks to identify evidence of facture in digital practices like computer-generated imagery (CGI) and animation, demonstrating how materiality persists and manifests in digital processes and tools.

Hybrid Facture

In tracing the genesis of the painting Swathe, it is not sufficient to focus on the use of paint and brushes. The work’s facture was initiated when Eastwood arranged a collection of props in an enigmatic tableau and veiled them in a thin sheet of magenta fabric. A high-resolution scan of the drapery was made using an Artec Leo wireless 3D scanner operated by a technician at the University of New South Wales, Alexander Veddovi-McCaughan. The resulting 3D model is a faithful virtual double of the hanging cloth shaped by the volumes that support it from within. Through the bodily act of moving the scanner around, the material cloth becomes encoded as a dataset of points, polygons and textures. The scanning process is part of the artwork’s facture: the model records the scanned fabric’s folds, as well as artefacts generated by the technology. In this context, the term ‘artefact’ is used to refer to some kind of anomaly arising during the process of capturing, processing or displaying digital media. An artefact renders computational operations visible; it is a record of digital making. It is fitting that artefact and facture have a shared etymology from the Latin factum, meaning ‘something made’.

Inspecting the 3D model of the drapery, several digital artefacts become apparent, functioning as visual cues that indicate the model’s digital materiality. In one portion, where there is a section of missing data, a gap in the mesh reads like a tear in the fabric. Similarly, in other sections of the scan there is incomplete data, resulting in low-fidelity rendering, evidenced by faceted geometric planes. These visible polygons, which are the building blocks of 3D digital models, are not errors as such. Rather, they demonstrate the technology performing as designed based on the inputs received in the scanning process. A seamlessly rendered model might correspond with a human expectation of machinic perfection, but, as media artist and theorist Michael Betancourt argues, the automated processes of facture that render digital outputs do not change depending on whether humans perceive a flawless or glitched appearance. Thus, digital artefacts, or glitches, in Betancourt’s words, ‘are simply human-readable forms of a digital work that exhibits unanticipated formal characteristics to that human audience.’ ⁷ Visible polygons, for instance, are reminders of the digital material that produced them and need not be concealed.

Working with the 3D model, Eastwood used editing software Adobe 3D Substance Stager to modify the virtual cloth’s colour, lighting, sheen, and orientation. Any trace elements of other objects detected during the scanning process were erased during this phase, leaving only the undulating surface of the suspended fabric. Multiple iterations of the file were rendered, and a version was eventually selected as a suitable source to paint.

When translating the digital reference into the painting Swathe, Eastwood chose to preserve some of these artefactual traces. He ‘repaired’ the virtual tear by painting in the missing cloth but intentionally left subtle evidence of the triangular polygon mesh in the depiction of drapery. These marks are more visually ambiguous in the painted interpretation, resembling wrinkles in the fabric rather than explicit references to digital artefacts, subtly blending digital and analogue aesthetics. Additionally, a perspectival floor pattern was introduced into the painting to achieve a heightened spatial effect, functioning also as a sly reference to the polygons from which the digital model was constructed.

As advanced digital technologies become increasingly accessible and integrated into our everyday lives, it is unsurprising to see computer aided processes augmenting the analogue studio techniques of contemporary painters. This can be seen in artist Avery Singer’s use of digital 3D assets purchased online and modified with the assistance of an animator using software including ZBrush, producing digital stills to be portrayed in her airbrushed paintings. ⁸ Further exemplifying the integration of digital processes into contemporary painting techniques, Emma Webster’s construction of forms sculpted in virtual reality with the 3D modelling software Blender, combined with other collage elements, become the basis of the composite images that feature in her painted landscapes. ⁹ The paintings of both Singer and Webster record distinctive hallmarks of the respective digital 3D modelling techniques that inform their finished works. In both cases, the pronounced artifice generated via the digitised mediations become prominent aesthetic features within their paintings. Likewise, the extensive mediation through digital and analogue processes results in an elaborately staged hyperreality in Eastwood’s painting Swathe. A ghostly effigy hovers precariously, propped up by some invisible assemblage. The process of creating this work was supported by an assemblage of materials, tools and bodies, from the initial 3D scan through to the completion of the painting. Each of these agents leaves their fingerprints, and the final work embeds both the analogue and digital facture that underlie its creation. The resulting image conveys an almost tangible representation of three-dimensional material yet remains strangely unreal.

From Painting to Animation

Eastwood’s Swathe was the departure point for Karen Kriss’s participation in this project. Kriss rematerialised the painting in a new medium, interpreting it through digital animation. Rather than accessing any of the digital 3D model files that originally informed the painting, Kriss’s source material was the painting itself. Through her intervention, the painting was reverse engineered, returning the drapery motif into a 3D digital model to produce a series of experimental animations. Extending the concept of facture as an animating force that records and replays how an artwork was formed, the animations allow the viewer to observe the image of the cloth taking shape.

In one of the experimental animations, the yellow cloth’s flowing, undulating motion is accentuated by the peculiar addition of strands of hair sprouting from the surface of the fabric. This playful simulation reimagines the static painting of drapery as something alive and susceptible to mutation through its various iterations, with elements of the abject or surreal becoming amplified by incongruous modifications. The temporal dimension of animation introduces the capacity for movement to heighten the drapery’s strange sense of unreality. The animations are not intended as a direct copy of the painting, but a response that carries the image further into a virtual realm. In so doing, it further layers the material transformations that make up its protracted mediation, from physical fabric to 3D scan, oil painting, and digital animation. Each stage rematerialises the image in a new form, adding to the hybrid nature of its facture.

Because digital art is often encountered through technological systems rather than through overtly tactile materials like paint on canvas, it is persistently perceived as an immaterial medium. However, media theorist Christiane Paul argues, ‘this immateriality cannot be separated from the material components of the digital medium.’¹⁰ The so-called "virtual" relies on cables, screens, servers, and energy; a whole infrastructure of physical substrates, including the bodies that interact with such work. Similarly, art historian Michael Yonan observes, 

Even the most detached, phantasmic postmodern product, the digital image that can be experienced virtually anywhere, still requires a material means of conveyance—a laptop, a phone—to be seen.¹¹ 

Paul introduces the term ‘neomateriality’ to describe artworks that emphasise an entwining of digital and analogue media, in which a virtual process or dataset is placed into a physical form.

The collaboration discussed in this article demonstrates neomateriality in that each stage of our cumulative process incorporates an aspect of the previous stage’s materiality in an altered form: the digital 3D scan reconstructs the original woven fabric as polygons, Eastwood’s painting interprets a digital simulation, and Kriss’s animations in turn transform the painted image, reinstating a digital presence, but in a new format. The digital animations introduce motion by simulating dynamic behaviours such as rippling, crumpling, and fluttering, as if the drapery is responding to forces such as wind and gravity or propelled by its own kinetic energy. The chain of rematerialisations across analogue and digital formats demonstrates that these media are not in opposition to each other; rather, they are in continual dialogue, each feeding into the other’s creation. Like Eastwood’s painting, Kriss’s animated works demonstrate a form of intermateriality in the sense that they manifest transmutations of materiality across media. Their ‘mutant material’ is shaped by virtual processes, yet traces of the image’s previous material incarnations are retained.

Analogue and Digital Materiality in Dialogue

Our approach corresponds with research that draws comparisons between analogue and digital artmaking. Media scholar Sara Sintonen has explored the ‘essence of materiality’ in artistic process in a comparative study between physical painting on paper and digital painting on a touchscreen. ¹² Her findings support the view that each medium offers unique affordances: neither the canvas nor the digital tablet can fully replace the other’s qualities, but together they can engage in a dynamic interplay. Sintonen, drawing on new materialist theory, emphasises that matter is not passive or inert; it exerts influence over how it takes shape in an artwork. Similarly, archaeologist Lambros Malafouris describes material agency as a reciprocal phenomenon between an artist and their materials, akin to collaboration. Identifying clay on a potter’s wheel as an example of ‘neuro-compatible’ material, Malafouris emphasises the significance of ‘material engagement’ through the tactile qualities of matter that responds to an artist’s touch.¹³ We contend that material engagement is significant irrespective of whether the material is physical, like clay or paint, or virtual, like pixels on a computer screen. Digital animation, for example, affords opportunities for the artist to think through 3D material, which is its own form of matter, not just a tool. As Sintonen observes, ‘analogue and digital technology have their own characteristic essences, they act differently as mediators’.¹⁴ This insight applies to our collaboration. Whether it is the tactile resistance of a brush laden with viscous paint as it is dragged across a canvas, or the malleability of a digital simulation, each medium modulates the creative process in distinct ways. Rather than view one mode as superior or more authentic, we are interested in the productive tension between them, and their capacity to translate (and mistranslate) each other.

The interplay of analogue and digital materials, and between two artists with different skills, generates emergent possibilities that neither artist could achieve in isolation. In practice, we have found that the analogue and digital aspects of our work continually inform and energise one another. A painting informs digital animations, which, in turn, suggest new directions for subsequent interpretations in various media. Each mode “speaks back” as a material with its own voice. The luminous, tactile surface of paint in Swathe, for instance, finds a resonant counterpart in Kriss’s animated interpretation that imaginatively transforms the drapery into a disquietingly visceral evocation of human flesh. The animation moves the way it does because of a complex set of potentials between the physics settings in the algorithm and Kriss’s intuitive adjustments informed by a bodily sense of gravity and motion. In turn, the unexpected behaviour of a virtual texture or simulated rippling motion suggest possible directions for future paintings.

An important development enabling this convergence is the advent of digital tools that foreground material engagement. Advanced 3D software like ZBrush or Substance Painter allows an artist to ‘paint’ directly onto a 3D model, or ‘sculpt’ digital clay with virtual tools. These programs make texturing and modelling feel more intuitively aligned with analogue painting and sculpting techniques, collapsing some of the technological barriers. Thanks to technological advancements in haptic devices or intuitive interfaces, digital artists can experience a greater sense of tactile feedback in real time. This marks a shift in digital art from purely computational operations towards a more intuitive, hands-on approach. It reinforces the notion that digital art, despite occupying a virtual domain, can involve a materially grounded, embodied engagement with the medium. The artist’s hand, gestures, and even muscle memory come into play, much as they do with physical media. In our case, such tools have allowed Kriss to treat digital 3D models not as sterile wireframes but as malleable material objects to be manipulated creatively. The facture of a digitally textured model can now include visible ‘brushstrokes’ or other tool operations that are analogous to those on a canvas or clay sculpture.

Indeed, we might say the digital studio has become an extension of the physical studio. Just as a potter thinks through the feel of clay or a painter through the drag of a brush, an animator can think through the movement of a cloth simulation or the weight of a virtual object. In all cases, the material constraints and possibilities are part of the thinking process. Our collaboration continually returns to this premise: materiality (whether of code or pigment) is not a passive vehicle but an active collaborator.

Material Performances in Animation

The simple cloth simulation created by Kriss in 3D animation software Autodesk Maya’s nCloth system demonstrates the agentic nature of digital materiality. In this animation experiment, a virtual piece of fabric falls and flutters in an imaginary space. Rather than mimicking the physics of actual cloth, our interest lay in tweaking the parameters to explore expressive possibilities. The software exposes variables such as air resistance, friction, stretch, and bounce. By adjusting these material qualities, the cloth can be made to behave as if it were heavy and stiff, or light and elastic, or as fluid as a piece of silk in water. The resulting motion typically conveys a convincing sense of realism, but the system is not bound to replicate real-world cloth physicality. The focus of Kriss’s experiments is on the feel and affect conveyed, the rhythm of the cloth’s movements, and the emotional tone they imply. In this way, the simulation becomes a kind of performance, with the cloth as an actor directed through code. The cloth can appear to have its own agency: it sways or snaps or billows as though it has a life of its own. This is a case of digital materiality going beyond static properties; it is about how the material moves and the affective intensities it generates.

Creating such an animation is an embodied, iterative process. Kriss often guides these adjustments by invoking her own bodily sense of motion, imagining the sensation of billowing fabric or a flag whipping in a gust of wind. The feedback loop is partly visual (viewed on screen) and partly physical-intuitive (sensing what parameters might give the desired dynamic). Through this, the boundary between the human mover and the digital material blurs; it is almost a dance with the software. We deliberately foreground this processual materiality in the final animations: the goal is not to present a flawlessly rendered illusion that conceals how they were made, but rather to celebrate the mutability and liveliness of the digital fabric.

In the spirit of experimental animation, facture makes the tools and processes visible, embracing the medium’s quirks and surprises rather than concealing them. This approach resonates with a lineage of artists and scholars in animation who examine or embrace materiality and abstraction, including animator Ellen Rocha’s account of tactile materials in animation and the writings of film scholar Paul Taberham and animation theorists Dan Torre and Lienors Torre on experimental and digital animation. In these discourses, animation is not just making drawings move, but making materials perform on screen. Similarly, animation theorist Paul Wells notes the significance of the ‘tactile memory’ of animated objects.¹⁵ These perspectives situate our work within a broader discourse that values the visible and tangible traces of process, recognising digital animation not as an immaterial illusion but as a medium deeply enmeshed with its own material conditions and histories. Together, these ideas reveal that animation’s materiality can be understood both within the traditions of experimental animation and through broader theoretical frameworks that address the physical infrastructures and embodied conditions underpinning all digital media.

By engaging consciously with both physical and digital materials, we find that unexpected outcomes and anomalies become sources of insight. One animation test, for instance, produced a circular rippling pattern in the cloth , a digital fingerprint akin to the scanning artefacts in Swathe. It was a peculiar and unexpected outcome, but rather than discard it as an error, we recognised it as digital facture, a mark of the tool that could be conceptually or visually integrated into the work. Such moments of surprise speak to deeper layers of materiality in the work. They remind us that even in a computer environment where one ostensibly has precise control, the material (in this case, the CG fabric) can assert itself in unanticipated ways. This indeterminacy should not be regarded as a flaw but a feature. It exemplifies the open-ended play of material agency that is commonly foregrounded in new materialist thinking.

Conclusion: Mutant Materiality

The Swathe project exemplifies a dynamic interplay between analogue and digital modes of imaging, underscoring materiality as a mutable and hybrid condition. Through iterative reconfigurations from studio assemblage to digital modelling, painting and animation, the project resists categorisation as a fixed outcome with a distinct material identity. Instead, it can be understood as an emergent, processual and diffractive practice, wherein each transmutation cumulatively generates a form that retains traces of its prior states. These traces function like fossils or fingerprints, indexing the layered process behind the construction of images. They bridge the analogue and the digital, the past and the present state of the image’s underlying continuum of material interactions. This approach corresponds with Petra Lange-Berndt’s concept of mutant material, which recognises the entanglement of physical and computational facture as a site of aesthetic and conceptual inquiry.

Although the collaboration between the co-authors has thus far proceeded as sequential investigations, with Kriss developing short animations that follow on from Eastwood’s initial painting, the outcomes reveal the artists’ shared concerns with material agency, processual ambiguity, and the embeddedness of digital artefacts within analogue facture and vice versa. Looking ahead, we anticipate a more integrated mode of exchange, wherein back-and-forth interaction between collaborators becomes further integrated and generative. Through a cumulative and reciprocal process of interpreting and manipulating images across diverse media, this project can continue to foster an exploration of overlapping concerns, enabling the emergence of hybrid works that synthesise the conceptual interests and material vocabularies of our combined practices. Our research will continue to interrogate the boundaries of medium specificity and contribute to broader discourses on the material conditions of contemporary images.