Today, we encounter visual data in both analogue and digital forms. The ever-increasing reliability of image-making techniques to 'accurately' represent a referent tends to support a misconception that images act only as duplicates, or documentary re-embodiments, of a reality. If that is the case, what does it suggest for representations of human beings?

 

As a practitioner, my primary concern is the objective representation of a being altered through digital and analogue media. I will present an overview of my painting practice - including natural image mutation, scale and the value of applying traditional media - to address my role as a translator, and mediator, of visual data; reflecting upon the co-dependent relationship between artist and the painterly and digital interfaces they work with, and operate through. This presentation will examine my painted artefact After IMG_3057 (2021) - an oil on canvas translation of a computer-generated quasi-human model created by Chris Karlberg - to [re]consider how we witness and interact with visual data that simulates the human form. Thomas Ruff’s Digital Photograms (2014) will be drawn upon to further example the [re]birth of digital data through analogue media and contemplate the significance of (intangible) data simulating the human form gaining corporeality. 

 

I will further address my painted images in relation to Steven Spielberg’s A.I Artificial Intelligence (2001) to consider the significance and value of the threshold between being and non-being. This presentation will culminate in musings of inter-medium fluidity and painterly self-being - reflecting on the agency of both digital and physical interfaces through which digital, painterly and photographic mediums indefinitely entwine.

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Abbie Schug is a visual artist whose research examines the translation of images through traditional and digital media, of which her primary concern is visual representations of the human being. Her practice considers the quasi-being of visual data, the threshold between reality and simulation and the relationship between artist and image. Abbie is currently working towards painted translations of a computer-generated quasi-human model.

 

Recent exhibitions include 'Emergence,' Rise Art, London (2021), 'MK Calling 2020', MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2020) and 'Quickly Moving,' NN Contemporary, Northampton (2019). Her paper ‘The Artist and Herself: A Dialogue on Reflection’ featured at the WithoutEnd Symposium (2019).