SLOW DRAWING: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE INANIMATE, ANIMATED, REAL AND VIRTUAL
This chapter focuses on the experience and findings of using digital auto-ethnography as a methodology to research drawing within an artistic practice. Investigating my practice in this way slowed down my usual process as experiences were documented, re-experienced, evaluated and reflected on. Therefore, the drawing process was observed over an extended period, leading to multiple conversations about and through drawing.
I will discuss how digital technologies slowed down the physical and cognitive processes of my drawing, thus creating new spaces and forms of dialogue. This retracing and reiteration of this process became highly nuanced, and, like conversation, enabled new perspectives and understanding, as well new forms of drawing to emerge. The dialogues were about drawing, made with drawing and expressed through drawing, resulting in the digital auto-ethnographic methodology forming, as well as informing the practice. There were tensions in this liminal space between the inside and outside of these dialogues, between being observer and observee, and between the cognitive and the virtual spaces.
Digital auto-ethnography will be outlined and defined within the field of auto-ethnographic study along with the burgeoning use of digital technologies that are used for self-documentation and observation. My conversations with drawing had several facets and will be explored thematically as: Conversations with the Inanimate and Animated, and Conversations with the Real and Virtual. The chapter interprets the interactions between: drawing, reflection, and the spaces for thinking that digital technologies can create.
Conversations with the inanimate explores relationships between the observer, drawing and the observed object or subject matter. In some cases, the objects were complex or unfamiliar and various strategies were used to gain familiarity with them: documenting thoughts and conversations about observing and recording artefacts, filming the objects and filming making drawings of artefacts. Inanimate drawings became animated through films that showed drawing taking form or ‘becoming’, and through seeing this process from different viewpoints and perspectives. Engaging with and making responses to artefacts, recording what was noticed and felt, and in the context of a museum residency, the physical interactions with people, were ‘conversations with the real’.
Paradoxically, using the virtual and digital to re-see, created a heightened awareness of what was being experienced in real time, ‘conversations with the virtual’ relates to spaces created through digital technologies but also to internal thinking and imagination. The transcribed spoken reflections, as well as recorded conversations with others, were documented privately at first and then re-constructed for a public audience. The fragments of conversations, whether with the real, animated or inanimate were experienced again and constructed to tell a story and were vital to my sense-making. The chapter concludes with how my drawing became methodologically entwined with digital auto-ethnography, thus changing my relationship to drawing and how I reflect on my practice.
Neil, J. (2017) Slow Drawing: Conversations with the Inanimate, Animated, Real and Virtual in J. Journeaux & H, Gorrill [Eds] Drawing Conversations: Collective and Collaborative Drawing in Contemporary Practice. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.