Arabesques
For the last few years I have been using vector-based computer drawings in my work to address the intersection of body with technology. If rhythm is connected to body and breath, then the temporality of computer media does not have a rhythm; or at best its rhythm is the perfectly regular beat of some internal timer. What comes along to shape and punctuate its tedious journey into the infinite can only be the imaginative effort of humans to compare numeric infinity with our own finiteness, it is the human interventions that instill “breath” into software.
I enjoy the relationship of both vectors and the arabesque to ideas of infinity and movement. In the arabesque, the line multiplies, branches, and doubles back on itself until it takes on an additional dimension: fractal-style. It gives the eye freedom to roam in all directions. My use of arabesques in these works references ideas from Islamic decorative practice meant to inspire a confrontation with infinity while implying a
subversion of the prohibition against figural representation by using “body-like” forms.
In “Point and Line to Plane,” Wassily Kandinsky suggested that the line itself is
invisible; it is “the trail left by the point in motion ... it comes about through
movement – by destroying the ultimately self-contained repose of the point.”
- A fine definition of vector drawing.
