Virtual Processes in Drawing and the Arts

Leonardo's Investigations

A possible urban legend about Leonardo Da Vinci at least since Sigmund Freud's study of the psychodynamics of his homosexuality, is that the identity or model for the Mona Lisa is the artist himself, rendered as a woman. The excellent conceptual design of Leonardo, ranging from imagined futuristic machines, visual imagery of anatomy produced by brilliant draughtsmanship, and imaginative realizations of anything from proto-aircraft to his desire woven into the presentation of self in an alternate gender, shows quite well the concept of the virtual -- five hundred years before computing.

Before photorealistic virtual environments in film or VR, painters encapsulated entire back histories of their subjects in research and iconography. Not only were physical qualities rendered, but iconography was also articulated through visual intelligence. Visual intelligence, further, can be used to depict what we haven't truly seen, for either viewing pleasure or for our own information. For every realistically-rendered piece of anatomy in Leonardo's drawings, there corresponds the artist's appropriation of an object in the world, for which its full content is co-opted for the back history of the visualization, and for the power of that visualization.

The virtual is very much connected to the concept of thought: it goes back to primeval writing and editing, as scribes transferred written material to additional scrolls using their knowledge of texts to effect a "perfect" translation that was never "perfect." Similarly, they painted oxen on the walls of Lasgaux as magic, ritual tokens for the purpose of growing their prosperity. Prehistoric peoples painted cattle on the walls of Lasgaux; they visualized animals, used them for ritual, and controlled their symbolic naissance in the "actual" world. Lasgaux is a ritualized visualization of material things for pre-human "control" of everyday life.

To return to Leonardo: it is well-known that he used a slide rule for calculating physical proportion. This use of measurement to produce something that previously did not exist in the particular form in which it was later realized, is another use of mathematics as a code to define appearances. With beautifully rendered anatomy, Leonardo employs a math of surfaces, for synthesis.

Part diagrammatic, part realistically-rendered in chiaroscuro, Leonardo's drawings and paintings model the world "out there": visualizing things which exist "in themselves", but also as representation, or that were invented for the representations themselves -- rationally as well as empirically.

Jacques-Louis David's Sketches

The Eighteenth Century painter, Jacques Louis David, emerged as a public artist of fin de siècle, revolutionary France. The Matraisse (a painters' guild) and the Royal Academy, two instances of class struggle intensifying into a public art poised at the collapse of the Old regime, left Antoinne Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Grueze in the recent past of 18th Century painting practice.

If the Matraisse was middle-class in origin, and the Academy represented state machinery, David's paintings represent the collapse of state sovereignty. Now if the artifact of revolutionary practices must be painting for the people, "Le Peuple", then what is it about David's sketches that demonstrates a virtuality, if not a comptabilité, prior to the age of computing? It is through building something from only research and personal history in the face of a blank drawing tablet, that artistic creation is configured with modest "ingredients" which become Neoclassical painting.

Is a trajectory from blank sheet to work of art possible, and if so, how? The theoretical David says, "If I just build a rough outline of the figures...". If we examine an early sketch for The Oath of the Horatio, we see basic demarcations, but no pre-fab realism here. The sketch is in-between physical appearances and a schema.

What is a schema? A schema is a kind of hybrid representation, like a model in the scientific sense yet almost like an extensible data notation, such as a database table. Imagining this computing concept as a generalized abstraction can help apply the notion of schema to sketch, a way of representing a specialized subject, such as with scientific illustration -- i.e. Hooke's Micrographia (a 17th Century scientific depiction of insects hundreds of times larger than their earthly scale).

What is Jacques Louis David's schema, and how does it frame the end of the Neoclassical period? How does the sketch give us insight into the infrastructure of The Oath, and what can be said about the formalism in David's use of perspective? Like a world without the architecture of space, so too, the first sketch of David is simply placed by the artist -- and not constructed "rigorously" through its perspective. The sketch is an idea, then an artistic and scientific idea, and then an idea erased into the Neoclassical realist image, a picture of history and a history of pictures, retrospecitvely classical.

David successively "erases" Romanticism with a careful Neoclassicism, which has acted as a waning history painting, growing into an ambivalent pursuit of a "noble" painting. David erases a structural absence from his image, structuring vision in a schema of classical subject matter through color and realism of the 18th century.

Alternate History/Virtual History

David, although many artists "virtually" re-inscribe representation through sketching, is an important figure of whom to cross-examine the history-making aesthetic role. Virtual practices in art necessitate asking how we can use aesthetic insight in so-called "objective" disciplines, without necessarily erasing history indebted to or indicting past agents and their contributions.

One way that art informs not only art history, but history in general, is through other virtual constructions-- or alternate histories. As artists produce historical paintings, so too, historians produce aesthetic histories -- even contextualized as speculation -- or to locate through traditional inquiry, what did NOT happen in History Proper.

Niall Ferguson, in Virtual History, argues that in order for speculative history to become scientifically "legitimate", it must root itself in controlled studies of the past, without necessarily imagining an alternate future. While it is questionable whether history loses its legitimacy through imagining an alternate future, there is something to be said for dedications to the materials and data of the past.

In filmmaking, it is the exploration of history in the pre-production process that allows an extrapolation for future worlds. Could a meaningful hybrid history/art be staged without posing the question of legitimacy or non-legitimacy? The very virtual nature of history/art comes from the fact that in making one of these practices more like the other, we don't gain or lose "legitimacy", but we simply change meaning. Meaning goes from historical reconstruction to a space of possibilities. Many groups represented in history, the present, and the future are encoded in qualitative, historical images/signs.

Too, in filmmaking, the future becomes just as unfamiliar as the past, and vice versa. Every anterior formal synthesis uses unfamiliar elements, which are part history, part future. Imagined futures then, become loaded with history. The very act of creation or synthesis can be imagined as the result of one or more changed events--for speculation and knowledge of highly differentiated relations in personal history. So virtual history is embedded in empirical and rational processes, collaboratively.

Conceptual Design

Conceptual Design, then, is a process of automating and streamlining "sketches" that are speculations about the world, and about authoring messages/plans/programs to change existing conceptual entities.

As Condor and Hansen show, parameter analysis, a process of rationalizing the creative design process, allows designers and artists to stimulate the progression of a modeling or design process. Parameter analysis goes from concept space (sketches, text-based architectural innovation) to realization space (the design artifact).

A design artifact is, just that: an artifact of a process that is foreground instead of any one state of a conceptual entity. Design is continually redesigned. Artistic and design facts are continually reevaluated and go through processes of modification given new requirements and user bases -- as well as given designers' modifications as a result of insight gained during the process of redesign.

As a form of rapid prototyping, sketching is reflected in contemporary, virtual, digital scenes, in CAD and 3D modeling and animation packages. In contrast, the sketch can be transformed from multiple, identical copies of one set of data, rather than one analog set, although guidelines for reuse proscribe duplicating code. With copies of digital models that are numerically identical to the "original", the molding of a sketch into "finished form" works not upon an analogue mock-up -- but upon a virtually exact digital surrogate.

The sketch then, like the rapid prototyping or building of forms in 3D modeling and animation, challenges its destination forms through sketched predecessors. The sketch advances the condition of being prior, into the future, through a presentation of the past. Past, future and present invention combine into practices that systematize their existence and reproduction. 3D modeling and animation, then, are similar cognitive practices to drawing with wash and lead, but with social, cultural, economic, and political ramifications that newly define--in the collapse of pre-production into production--our era.