Both digital and analogue artmaking techniques often negotiate between simulation and the concrete presence of the ‘system of simulation’, that is, the tools and materials at play and their limitations. Christiane Paul defines simulation as ‘the imitative representation of one system or process by another’.¹ This paper describes a PhD practice-based research project which establishes a dialogue between digital and analogue artmaking through the tactile experience of my body. I frame the body as the interface between this translation from ‘one system or process’ to another, making its presence known through the inconsistencies, and tactile experience of materials, which shapes the artistic outcomes.

The research is carried out through intuitive interaction between my body and non-human materials, reflecting Paul Carter’s concept of 'material thinking’ which recognises making and the manipulation of materials as a site of intellectual enquiry.² While Carter generally applies the concept to analogue artmaking practice, I move back and forth between analogue and digital media, applying the term ‘materials’ to physical wax and silicone, as well as virtual simulated and captured materials.³ The process creates objects and images, which emulate the appearance and feeling of malleable and viscous materials reminiscent of bodily textures.

The research is a way of exploring the intermingling of input from the artist’s body, tools and materials. Donna Haraway argues that ‘…technologies are not mediations, something in between us {but} "infoldings of the flesh”'.⁴ She argues that in using any form of technology, we inevitably merge it with our body. Similarly, Heidegger suggests that technologies are connected to the bodily processes which they replace. He gives the example of a typewriter wrenching the writing process from the hands, forming a bond.

Through a body of work including animation, virtual reality and sculpture, this research acknowledges and augments the presence of the body in artmaking across both digital and analogue spaces, allowing a generative exchange to occur. The techniques and materials I employ are extrusion of clay and silicone, 3D printing, 3D animation and photogrammetry capture.⁵ The practice-based approach allows insights to emerge from the organic and intuitive trajectory of my art practice.⁶  To formalise and communicate these insights, I have employed methods of data collection and reflection alongside artmaking, an approach substantiated by the work of scholars such as Donald Schön, Linda Candy.⁷

By exposing my own creative process in this way, I observed that the tactile and sensory experience of making in varied media would inform each other, creating a dialogue that bridged analogue and digital artmaking, and foregrounded the place of the body’s tactile sense in the process.

Context

Artists have been exploring the dialogue between computers and analogue techniques since computer graphics were more widely used in the 1960s. Some significant moments include the establishment of the Groupe Art et Informatique de Vincennes (GAIV) in Paris in 1969 which aimed to visualise a programming aesthetic using traditional art processes. For instance, ‘pixel by hand’, involved manually translating an algorithmic pattern from a computer as a painting or drawing.  Also in the late 1960s, Harold Cohen connected computers to analogue art in his creation of AARON, an algorithm-driven plotter drawing machine which autonomously creates paintings and drawings. In the contemporary context, artists such as Rachel Rossin and Jacolby Satterwhite layer digital and analogue making techniques to create tactile representations of the body in virtual space. Rossin draws parallels between the distortions of digital media and the fallibility and subjectivity of human perception and memory. Satterwhite creates camp other-worldly scenes by drawing on virtual space’s capacity to layer many disparate elements together, using motion capture, photogrammetry, analogue drawings and video footage. However, while these artists primarily process visual and representative imagery, there is opportunity to explore the tactile implications of artmaking tools.

Methodology

To gain insight to the digital/analogue exchange, I shine a light on the unspoken and intuitive elements of my artistic process through practice-based research and reflection. Practice-based research rests on an understanding that knowledge emerges through action and subjective experience. Methods of data collection and reflection were employed to convert some of the ineffable creative thinking into sharable knowledge. These methods were photographic process documentation, sketches and reflective writing. The research observes how the many subjective filters of art practice, including my body, my chosen materials and tools come into play, drawing on philosopher Julia Kristeva’s view that the body acts as a dynamic filter to our experience. Its biological processes, emotions, culture and history all shape our perception which we then convert to rational systems of language and knowledge.⁸ The artworks are the manifestation of an idea that travels through numerous filters specific to me as the artist as well as the time, place, environment and materials from where the work emerged. I see the elements of my practice as filters, and my body is an important one of these. The below diagram illustrates the passage of an idea or mass through the filters of process and the influence of my body, to be extruded out the other end as an artwork output.

For example, my body’s sensory response to materials often drives creative decisions. The materials I use—clay, silicone, wax and ballistics gel—resonate with the textures and materiality of the body. They are wobbly, sticky and translucent. The creative decisions of my practice are generally driven by actions which enable these sensory interactions, such as extrusion, slicing, melting or kneading.

Practice

The practice discussed here employs manual sculptural techniques as well as digital techniques for capture and simulation. Through iterative translation between media and tools, shared connections between media emerged and aspects inherent to physical and digital tools were exchanged. The techniques used are outlined below.

1. Photogrammetry is a capture technique which uses multiple photographs of a physical object to create an accurate virtual replica. Photogrammetry creates a bridge between physical and virtual making.
2. 3D printing is another bridging tool, converting an object from virtual to physical form.
3. 3D animation using the software Houdini enables the simulation of physical materials through both animated dynamic behaviour such as viscosity and elasticity as well as visual material properties such as reflectivity, colour and sub-surface scattering⁹
4. Physical sculpture involves the direct manipulation of physical materials with my body. Silicone and clay were extruded through syringes and perforated metal.

Extrusion is a central action in the practice discussed in this paper. While it enables the sensory interaction between my body and material, it epitomises the concept of formation through a filter, which underpins this research. The formless and malleable mass of clay or silicone is forced through the filter of the nozzle to become a discrete form with its own shape and boundary. Similarly, the practice I describe is ‘extruded’ through many media and artmaking techniques, each one shaping the outcome with its inherent limitations, resistance and agency.  

The practice-based research emerged from the initial action of extruding clay and silicone. The consistency of the clay, varying between soft and hard, impacted the feeling and ease of extrusion, as well as the integrity of the output form. There was an optimum consistency which seemed to offer enough resistance that I felt actively engaged in its extrusion while being fluid enough to pass through the nozzle. In parallel to these sculptures, I created computer-generated (CG) piles of noodle-like forms in the software Houdini. While the CG noodles emulated the overall behaviour of the physical clay noodles, they lacked the nuance of surface and material inconsistencies of the clay. For example, the lower half of one of the clay piles was softer than the upper half, resulting in more compression. The surface of the physical object also showed grooves, popped air bubbles and grit, while the CG noodle surface was consistent and smooth. The CG noodles required much more labour and fabricated complexity to approach the same level of detail and inconsistency as the physical counterpart. With the physical sculpture, there was an inverse relationship to consistency and labour, where regularity is associated with increased care and time. However, while the physical material had a high level of nuance and regularity, these qualities were fixed. The virtual material, on the other hand, could take on any property assigned to it. With the manipulation of values, I could change qualities such as the material’s reflection, colour and translucence. I could also edit the surface itself through the displacement values.¹⁰ The figures below show the same base model with varying surface displacement values.

Translating the CG noodle pile back to physical space, I output it as a 3D print. The object, having crossed over the virtual/physical divide, acquired certain artefacts. Some of the 3D print filament did not adhere, leading to noodle-like aberrations in the surface. The surface had also gained horizontal striations, resulting from the print layers and vertical support columns. Through a different process from the original clay extrusion, the printed object also exhibited extruded noodle-piles, creating a connection between the two stages of practice.

The extrusion aspect of 3D printing was pursued further by introducing the ceramic 3D printer, the Potterbot. Since this machine builds form by extruding clay, the connection to my original sculpture was even more prominent. However, the shape of the Noodle-pile objects I tried to print were not suited to the Potterbot, so I encountered a lot of breakage. In frustration, I intervened in the machine’s process, picking up the base platform which holds the output object and manually controlling it underneath the extrusion stream. Through this method, the clay built up and adhered much more successfully, despite erring unrecognisably from the digital file input. The resulting surface appeared like loops and knots of yarn or noodles. The function of the Potterbot had transitioned from translation through simulation, copying the form of the digital object, to translation through emulation, finding its own inherent noodle-like behaviour which recalled the materiality of the original object. This development was stimulated by the resistance of both the machine and material, forcing the process to find an alternate path. The filters of my practice in this instance included the sticky viscosity of the clay, the constant extrusion pressure of the Potterbot, the digital 3D object file, and the inconsistent movement and support of my own body. I adapted this technique to use a hand-held electric extrusion gun, allowing me to build bigger forms, and to build onto a static surface, rather than holding the weight of the sculpture.

Bringing the physical sculpture into virtual space led to comparisons with the CG noodles I had made in Houdini. The photogrammetry captured object retained the material nuances of the physical clay, however, it adopted new artefacts and imperfections from the digital translation process. For instance, the simplification of the surface details were revealed in the straight edged polygons visible in some areas. The object also changed from being a solid physical mass, to a virtual shell of surface. The translation of the object to the virtual introduced the potential for 3D animation. I applied dynamic material animation to a series of these ceramic sculptures, bringing them to life with wobbling, bouncing movements. The movement I assigned to them recalled the behaviour of the wet pliable clay during the making of these sculptures, creating a connection between these two stages of making. I found that causing the virtual material to behave in this way brought a similar sensory satisfaction to the manipulation of the physical clay. In this way, my experience of the physical material informed my decisions with the virtual material.

The manual clay extrusion technique was adapted to use silicone, creating translucent coloured sculptures. Unlike the rigid fired clay, these silicone sculptures remained flexible and would wobble comically when agitated. While the captured ceramic sculptures were animated in virtual space, I animated these silicone sculptures physically by placing motorised cat toys inside them for the exhibition Things are Growing, (Airspace, Marrickville). This caused the sculptures to independently wobble and vibrate on their plinths. In the same exhibition I mounted four silicone sculptures on automatic roving vacuum cleaners. These kinetic sculptures, roamed around the gallery floor, occasionally colliding with plinths, power cords or walls, causing the sculpture to wobble. Within this series of works, a connection was established between the original movement felt in the physical materials, the movement through virtual animation and the physical movement through motorisation. Translating between media allowed me to explore the material’s capacity for movement in different contexts. 

Pursuing the ‘re-animation’ of the making process further, I created a virtual reality experience of my physical studio, Mind the Globs (2023). In this work, the viewer finds themself within a digital replica of my studio space, captured using photogrammetry. Throughout the space are individually animated objects from the studio, bouncing, churning and flopping onto the floor and furniture. I gave the objects the same wobbly bouncing behaviour I had used previously with the ceramic captured objects. Placing these objects individually revealed to me the fluidity of their scale and context. Once an object had been digitised, it became isolated, floating in virtual space. It was stripped of its context and relative scale within an environment. This fluidity invited manipulation of scale as I placed the objects in the virtual studio space. Some of them were enlarged to tower over the space, slowly swaying and bouncing over the viewer, while others remained close to their original scale. The other factor which emerged on placing these objects was the freedom to place them in vertical space. Unconstrained by the limits of gravity, I was able to place objects mid-air or overhead, recalling the immersive collage-like aesthetic of Satterwhite’s virtual spaces. Satterwhite views this ‘freedom’ of 3D space as analogous to a freedom of identity, race and sexuality, where one can be anything or anywhere without the limits of convention.¹¹

After having created Mind the Globs, its expanded use of space and scale informed my subsequent installation, Things are Growing at Airspace, Marrickville. In this exhibition I installed motorised silicone works on the floor and the ceiling, as well as at a more conventional waist-height on plinths. I also projected animated objects on the walls, ranging in scale from that of the sculptures to the size of an entire wall. This exhibition, despite not containing any virtual reality works, retained the expansive use of space and scale which I had experienced in virtual space. 

In the examples described above, there is a cross pollination of material influences across media. The following diagram demonstrates some of these bi-directional exchanges between physical and virtual artmaking techniques.

As I observed the entanglement of the processes of my practice, my body, the tools and materials in use and my felt experience of making, I can relate to Haraway’s image of the infoldings between flesh and technology. Intuitively moving between artmaking techniques created folds and buckles in processes, bringing certain elements into contact. My felt experience and the intervention of my body in these processes was the connecting thread. This approach enables an exchange between processes, leading to unique artistic outcomes.