Drawing and digital prints, 2018-9

Drawings based on the raw images from NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn. The Cassini raw images are digital images taken remotely by a spacecraft orbiting Saturn. As ‘raw’ data, they predate the fixing of scientific meaning. Despite being composed of mutable and discreet pixels, they share with analogue photography the instant of capture, which forever ties them to the object imaged.

Saturn Incognito uses drawing to address the various ‘traits’ of analogue photography that digital images are said to lacking:

  • A negative: selected images are digitally inverted, drawn in pencil on aged paper and subsequently scanned, inverted again and enlarged to produce prints. Drawings and prints are presented together. Inverting the images evokes the analogue ‘negative’ and hence the presence of an indexical original, later undermined by their manual rendering in drawing and later re-digitisation.
  • Materiality and temporality: the antique paper provides an exaggerated materiality and sense of time-lived, another aspect of our experience of images endangered by the screen-favouring digital. The work explores the relationship between surface and process, objectivity and subjective expression, especially in our encounters with such scientific raw data.

Above: pencil on antique paper, 21 x 30 cm (approximate)

Above: Inverted prints, 42 x 59 cm. Digital prints on Hahnemühle PhotoRag paper 308gsm, 2019

Above: Installation view, Left Bank Leeds, July, 2019