Digital Lyricism: New Origins of Drawing

Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alféri titled the first volume of their Revue de Littérature Générale (1993–95) Mécanique Lyrique. In doing so, they aligned themselves with avant-garde movements that brought together visual arts and writing, and with their fascination for technology. Surrealists, Futurists, experimental filmmakers, and American Beat poets such as William S. Burroughs each, in their own way, envisioned technological hybridisations. Henri Michaux expressed this relationship in graphic form: he imagined a “cinematic drawing” that would take the pulse of the day… He turned instead to mescaline, a psychedelic substance, as a kind of chemical technology bridging the psyche and the page—and it is with his drawing that this exhibition begins.

Would Michaux have marvelled at today’s generative technologies, or, like the artists presented here, would he have paired the ancient stylus with the digital pen? From its (admittedly mythical) origins, drawing has been mechanical: it doubles the world, while at the same time stripping away a part of its soul. The daughter of a potter traces the outline of her lover’s shadow on a wall, and Pliny the Elder sees in this the origin of art at the beginning of our era. Drawing was thus “discovered” as both an act of capture and a form of techno-thinking.

Like that young woman, contemporary artists are reinventing drawing through new technologies. From the earliest stages of bitmap graphic software to vector drawing, they have perceived the lyrical potential of these generated, programmed, and animated lines—as well as of their failures. This back-and-forth between the material and the virtual, contact and distance, writing and code, situates drawing between the virtual presence of the shadow and the animated absence of the image.