Centralized, decentralized and distributed network models by Paul Baran (1964), part of a RAND Institute study to create a robust and nonlinear military communication network . 

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... have gone from the aesthetics of appearance, stable forms, to the aesthetics of disappearance, unstable forms.” —Paul Virilio, Pure Similar to the computer’s evanescence from mainframe to smartphone to cloud, painting today is undergoing an ontological drift from one mode of existence to another—from fresco to canvas to networked, painterly immateriality—a reterritorialization I call painting in the distributed field . Just as modernist painting ceded representation to explore its own materiality after the advent of photography, I believe painting today risks obsolescence unless it addresses its position relative to virtualization within complex adaptive networks, augmented reality everyware user interfaces, and the differential tensions between shortened attention span and accelerated perceptual intake. I use the term “distributed painting” to describe a mediumistic diffraction into the conceptual space around painting, from the static interface of pigment and canvas to the contingent screenspace of immaterial distribution platforms. 1 This diffraction decenters both the locally manifest single art object—a traditional 1:1 art/viewer relationship based in presentness— to a distributed representation of an art object embedded in what we might call telepresentness. In this paper I will thus argue that distributed painting forces a redefinition of painting as a contextual information space, as different from the pastiched postmodern picture plane or Greenbergian optical space as these were from Renaissance picture space: a culturally-coded zone of focus that suggests “paint” regardless of whether actual pigment or tangible surface is involved. Lastly, I will show that distributed painting’s two-way diffraction—its form smeared across a range of media platforms on the one hand, and into alternate categories of viewer experience on the other—renders its information capacity practically limitless, opening a spectrum of possibilities between tradition and newness, and between presence and absence. A distributed painting is one that can exist in a multiplicity of forms and conditions simultaneously. A passive example is the increasingly common usage of jpegs as Derridean supplements for viewing the actual painting, e.g. “I checked out those paintings you mentioned yesterday, they’re pretty great.” Here, unless the speaker made a rapid overnight trip to seek them out, the “paintings” in question are likely the first few dozen results of a Google Image search. 2 A more active example would be a work that either originates in or is intended to be realized in digital form, such as this work by an emerging artist (and former graduate student of mine) named Will Penny. For this work Penny downloaded and aggregated the first 1,000 Google Image results of the words red , yellow , and blue , and averaged the color spectrum of those 1,000 jpegs per color into a single RGB number for each. The result is this triptych, a crowd-sourced painting that both resonates with Rodchenko’s famous triptych of 1921, and provides a snapshot of what the colors “red,” “yellow” and “blue” meant to the digital zeitgeist at the time of that particular search. This next piece, by another emerging artist and former graduate student of mine named Brandon Woods, is a 90-minute recording of the 3D-animated video game The Elder Scrolls , sped up by a factor of 60, routed through sound-processing software and then retranslated into a graphics file. The temporally glitchy result is a literally- and semiotically-coded, visually assaultive, attention span-shredding—and potentially seizure-inducing—“painting,” as the artist calls it, which in its own way reinterprets and abstracts the landscape and environment as radically as Kandinsky’s Composition paintings or Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean series did in their own day. More importantly, by retaining all the information and speeding it up dramatically—the full 90- second clip is over 100 megabytes—the work poses a real challenge to the viewer in terms of attention, or even just keeping up with it. Two important points: while both of these works do things not technically possible until recently, they also make a point to foreground their relationships to artistic precedents like the landscape and the monochrome, or abstraction and flatness. Further, both works are freely available: Will’s triptych is time-stamped and includes the RGB numbers of each panel so you can make one yourself, and Brandon’s works are available from his website. Here, localization and exclusivity are trumped by distributability. As these examples show, distributed painting is in many ways an amplification of decentering processes long at work in the spheres of both technology and art, predicated on the transition from centralization to decentralization to distribution. A way to visualize these modes is with Paul Baran’s 1964 network models (Figure 1). What I call centralized painting is hierarchically locatable in history and in discourse, with an aura of physical instantiation; it exists only in its own physical space as an object and is considered to carry a specific set of meanings: pre-modern and modern painting—at least as narrativized in most art history books—might be considered centralized networks, hierarchically structured around such qualities as originality, genius, precedence and presentness. Decentralized painting operates as a mesh of peripheral nodes around a centralized conceptual architecture, less hierarchic but still subject to locatability and to a flux of discursive entanglements: postmodern painting was in my opinion a decentralized network, less hierarchic than modernism and organized as a fluid network of subsidiary hierarchies and intertextual entanglements. Distributed painting , on the other hand, is both difficult to pin down in space and conceptually non-hierarchic: a swarm of aesthetic data points, fragmented and packet- switched through networked many-to-many/node-to-node interchanges, and accordingly less focused on metanarrativity or privileged meaning. Contemporary painting is a distributed network, grounded less in discursive placement or hierarchy than in a perpetual, relational flux. 3 Distributed painting circulates in at least two distinct directions: on the one hand the format itself is diffused, reconfigured through the virtualization of forms previously grounded in concrete materiality and specificity. This type of distributed painting—analogous to what David Joselit calls “a heterogeneous and often provisional structure that channels content” (52)—tests the boundaries of what constitutes painting in the first place, as aestheticized binary artifacts defined as “paintings” are dispersed across a range of nontraditional viewing modes like touchscreens, Pantone numbers, and animations. Such works are taken in quickly, part of a screen culture that privileges fast information intake at the expense of attention span. These forms spread laterally as post-medium—or more accurately, transmodal—paintings, detached from the spatially specific limitations of pigment on canvas. Corollary to this distribution of format, the viewing experience of such art goes beyond a simple 1:1 relationship with a physically present viewer (Figure 2). A distributed painting is delocalized: ready for viewing, downloading and remixing by end-users worldwide, a crowd- sourced author-function that poses a serious challenge not just to tangibility, aura and locatability, but also to what painting even “is” in such a formally and experientially disseminated context. Leo Steinberg anticipated some of these concerns in his late 60s essay Other Criteria , noting: Art’s perpetual need to redefine the area of its competence by testing its limits takes many forms ... At one historical moment painters get interested in finding out just how much their art can annex, into how much non-art it can venture and still remain art. At other times they explore the opposite end to discern how much they can renounce and still stay in business. What is constant is art’s concern with itself, the interest painters have in questioning their operation. (77) In many ways then, distributed painting is but a continuation of the possibly inherent exploratory tendencies of art itself. I believe, however, that these new modes represent a substantial change, a paradigmatic rather than parametric transformation. A term from statistical linguistics, parametric change describes variation within a system that—however dramatic— remains within the bounds of that system. For example, the transitions from realism to impressionism to cubism to abstraction, as radical as they were, were parametric changes that remained within the bounds of painting proper: variations of pigment on a flat surface. Distributed painting, however, which we might in fact call post-paint painting , is a paradigmatic change, radically reconfiguring not only the components within a system, but the very boundaries and qualities of the system itself. 4 Among these paradigmatic changes is the way distributed painting reconfigures the expectations of the viewer: superseding questions of representation vs. abstraction, the issues become those of representation vs. presentation, of a potential for presentness without tangibility. Again, Steinberg anticipated some of these issues in his naming of a new kind of painting surface he saw emerging in postwar media culture, a flatbed picture plane (82) that went beyond the limits of pictorial or optical space and operated instead as an information-dispensing surface, akin to what we would today call an interface. Technology trends in recent decades have been toward the realization of an invisible interface. Anyone who used computers in the early 80s will recall how terrible they were before the Graphic User Interface; the replacement of command prompts with ...