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Presented in slightly modified form at CAA, February 15, 2014
Diffused Art and Diffracted Objecthood: Painting in the Distributed Field
“We have gone from the aesthetics of appearance, stable forms, to the aesthetics of disappearance,
unstable forms.” —Paul Virilio, Pure
War
Introduction
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.
Painting: Centralized > Decentralized > Distributed
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
1 Note that the present paper is focused more on what is distributed through the field of distributed painting
than on the field of distribution itself (to the limited extent the two can be differentiated).
2 A point easily illustrated by showing a digital projection of the Mona Lisa and asking the typical audience
what it is. Most will likely answer “the Mona Lisa” rather than “a projected binary-coded representation of
the Mona Lisa,” indicating the degree to which digital supplemental facsimiles are increasingly—and
implicitly—considered interchangeable with the original object.
Painting in the Distributed Field
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.
Figure 1: 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.
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
Painting in the Distributed Field
3
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.
Figure 2: In addition to the 1:1 relationship of a single instance of an artwork + a single viewer,
distributed painting is also capable of 1:M and M:M viewing relationships, serially or simultaneously.
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,
3 An interesting avenue of research would be to consider whether distributed networks can be used to
model Hegel’s notion of the end of history, as a high-entropy continuum of syntagmatically-equalized
discursive probability distribution.
Painting in the Distributed Field
4
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.
The Distributed Painterly 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 the spatial metaphors of
“desktops” and “file folders” had the dual effect of complicating the interface codes while making
the surface experience more smooth and hence more usable. Today’s interfaces are simpler still,
being practically invisible and relying less on command prompts than on simple hand gestures.
The painterly interface, on the other hand, is more complicated. If a painting’s interface is
a complex aggregate of picture plane, painted surface and semiotic content, the closest painting
ever got to an invisible interface was arguably during the 16th to 18th centuries, with the smoothed-
out interface of peak realism: at the risk of oversimplification, the experience of the painted object
itself was minimized in favor of direct access to the content it carried. With the rise of the
expressive brushstroke, however, came a change in the painterly content delivery interface, in
which the formal means of communication—the paint—itself became an explicit carrier of
4 Joseph Kosuth, though he didn’t use these terms, described parametric vs. paradigmatic change in his
essay Art after Philosophy, writing that cubism and abstraction, however radical, were simply new topics
inserted into a long-unfolding conversation—and thus parametric changes. With the readymade Duchamp
changed the conversation itself, forcing a paradigmatic change in the conditions of modernism (18).
Painting in the Distributed Field
5
content. In a Joan Mitchell painting, for example, the painterly interface simultaneously
constitutes—and is constituted by—the work’s form, delivery mechanism and content.5
How, then, does interfaciality operate in terms of distributed painting? Network theorists
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker define an interface as “an artificial structure of
differentiation between two media [through which] dissimilar data forms interoperate […]
Meaning is a data conversion” (144-145). Considered as packet-switched signals operative within
the teletopologies of networked systems—a dispersed amplification of what Boris Groys called
the algorithmic performativity of the digital image file (85)—the interface of distributed painting
is necessarily layered differently than that of analog painting. Whereas the centralized, analog
artwork is an aesthetic instantiation with physical, interfacial presence—size, sensuous surface
quality, and so on— in distributed form it is manifest via an interface of commercial technology.
The smooth glass surface and invisible interface of a tablet creates an interesting conceptual
friction—a “data conversion” in Galloway and Thacker’s terms—when programmed to represent
the semiotically complex, expressive facture of a painterly surface as understood in contemporary
artistic discourse.
The differential tension between our expectations of painting—physicality, texture and
static permanence vs. the contingent, interactive qualities of a reprogrammable, invisible
interface—opens up compelling possibilities for datafication, a term from big data meaning the
quantification and tabulation of content into algorithmically analyzable formats (Mayer-
Schönberger 78). For example, just as tracking the most frequently highlighted phrases in a Kindle
ebook generates data above and beyond the authorial content of the text in question, the distributed
painterly interface allows for data generation above and beyond the expressive or discursive
content intended by the artist. A high-tech example of what Heidegger would call an ontic
approach to art, the datafication of distributed painting suggests a reconfiguration of such binaries
as drawing vs. design and form vs. content into a triangulation of form vs. content vs. data.6 These
relationships—datafied form vs. content and paratextual content vs. discursive metadata—provide
a painterly corollary to what computer scientist Leslie Valiant describes as the facilitation of
computer evolution through the “conceptual separation at the very beginning between the physical
technology … and the algorithmic content of what was being executed on the machines; [between
the] physical object and the information processing it performs” (54).
Interestingly resonant with Sol LeWitt’s statement that “the idea becomes a machine that
makes the art” (846), this suggests a way to make the most of a slow medium like painting in the
fast media of networked systems: by way of aestheticized communicability itself. As Anna
Munster claims, in networked systems the important factor is not so much what a signal
communicates, but rather a signal’s “nonspecificity, its communicability [….] The key is not what
is spreading. ... What becomes crucial … is movement between. Communicability, rather than
communication, is key” (116-117). Unlocked from a materially static surface that unfolds content
only over the long run, the distributed painting is a contextual zone, a “differential tempo of
spreading … where transitions occur and then speed gathers” (Munster 111). In other words, the
5 To push the example further, a Peter Halley or Mary Heilmann painting carries not only the above
interface complexity, but also the added gloss of a discursively recursive awareness of the modernist
history of just such interface complications.
6 This raises the possibility of a kind of parergonic metadata, combining Jacques Derrida’s interest in the
dissolution of binary oppositions and Roland Barthes’ second-order signification with Gérard Genette’s
description of paratextuality, “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of
transaction: a privileged place … at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent
reading of it” (2).
Painting in the Distributed Field
6
importance of the content communicated by the distributed artwork is negotiated by the vectors
through which that content is spreadable—not only an intriguing network variation on Harold
Rosenberg’s description of action painting, but also a literalized version of medium as message in
which the distributed painting is its own paratext, a dromological semiosphere generating its own
data and metadata about—and as constitutive of—itself.7 Whereas the medium specificity of
materials and objects privileged a specific location and tangible presence, the trans-modal, post-
object non-specificity of the distributed painting privileges vectors of circulation, copying, sharing
and remixing.8
This prompts the realization that as painting enters immaterial distribution channels its
information potential increases dramatically, in terms of a foundational measure of information
theory called Hartley’s formula, H = n log s. Here, H = the amount of information in a
transmission, n = the number of symbols in the transmission, and s = the number of symbols
possible in that transmission’s language. The information content of a transmission—including the
type of visual transmission we call “painting”—was formalized further by Claude Shannon as the
sum of the content of its symbol types, reduced by constraints on the likelihood of the appearance
of any specific combination of symbols—known as the transmission’s relative entropy. Further,
the appearance of any given symbol combination is limited not only by the intended transmission
content, but also by the structural limits built in to the signal system itself—known as the signal’s
redundancy (Shannon and Weaver 56).
Figure 3: The amount of information contained in a message, in this case the word “information,” is
measured by the predictability of what signal comes next as that message is constructed, in tension with the
inherent structural limitations of the communication medium.
7 Here also we see Julia Kristeva’s phenotext—the phenomenological manifestation of communicative
possibilities bounded by the conceptual and discursive space of the genotext (28-29)—become unstable,
undergoing serial, aperiodic instantiations according to the default settings and limitations of a wide range
of interface platforms.
8 Mail art—a form of art by definition created for distribution and sharing—fits into this schema in an
enlightening way, due to the differences in the material vs. immaterial nature of what is distributed. Issues
of material friction in analog networks vs. immaterial frictionlessness in digital networks, plus their
respectively (and relatively) closed form vs. open form, is an important factor vis-à-vis art’s information-
carrying capability, as discussed in the paragraphs immediately following.
Painting in the Distributed Field
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To be more precise, the amount of information contained in any particular message, such
as in the word “information,” (Figure 3) is measured by the predictability of what signal comes
next as the message is constructed. Unpredictability is initially high: given the way words are
constructed in the English language just about any letter could come after the letter I. As the
message unfolds—whether a word, a sentence, a conversation, or a book—the range of options
narrows. In our example of the word information, by the end, following T-I-O, the likelihood of
the next letter being B or Z, for example, is effectively zero because such a sequence of letters is
always followed by the letter N.9
This might sound fairly abstract, but consider the way different styles of art can be defined
by this formula: the type of signal content put forward by any given painting (H) is constrained by
its stylistic limitations—Impressionism or Suprematism, for example (n)—which are defined by
the number of possibilities allowed within the parameters of that particular stylistic language. This
signal range of possibilities can be pushed only so far before it becomes a different style altogether
(s). For example, there are only so many ways to make an analytic cubist painting: change its
stylistic vocabulary too much—its signal range and channel capacity—and it becomes something
else. The type of form and content one could put across (H, the information in a specific signal
like Picasso’s Ma Jolie), was limited by the number of options used in the painting itself (n),
which were in turn constrained by the narrow range of signal options (s) allowable by analytic
cubism overall: flattened, shallow picture space, a generally monochromatic picture plane,
synecdochal hints of representation, and so on. As soon as a painting stepped outside that limited
signal spectrum it became something else: synthetic cubism, or constructivism perhaps.10
Distributed painting, however, has an open-ended signal spectrum unburdened by the
boundary conditions of materiality: manifest in multiple locations simultaneously, prone to
remixing and privileging dissemination over form, the differential tensions between a particular
artwork and its stylistic, material and formal limitations are blown wide open. While this increases
its information potential, such an increase risks aesthetic dissolution into random noise: if it can
theoretically be everything or anywhere is it really a valid example of anything? If art’s dynamism
arises in part from the tension between innovation and history, the dynamic equilibrium between
structure and surprise and between exploration and limitation, what happens when there are no
longer any boundary conditions against which to push?
If distributed painting is so different from traditional analog painting in almost every way,
from form and content to aesthetic information capacity, how might it maintain a conceptual focus
robust enough to remain “painting”? Correlatively, if its information capacity runs the risk of
exponential increase toward meaninglessness, is there a mechanism by which distributed painting
can maintain signal coherence as “painting”? I believe there is, by way of a notion called
skeuomorphism.
9 Incidentally, Google’s ability to predict a search query as it is being typed is based on this calculation of a
message’s relative entropy and its redundancy as the phrase unfolds, with the added input of data-mined
correlations of previous users’ word frequency combinations.
10 Another example of signal range as applied to fine art is Donald Judd’s work: part of the viewer’s
interest comes from seeing the ways his work was and was not able to progress over decades while
operating within such a severely constrained Hartley’s formula channel capacity.
Painting in the Distributed Field
8
Distributed Painting as a Skeuomorphic Representation of Painting
A skeuomorph is a visual metaphor such as a computer’s desktop or file folder icons—
relatable representations that mask complex binary processes—simplified interfaces that make
new or complex experiences less alien by resituating them in familiar terms. To give but one
example, a computer’s “trash can” is actually a thermodynamic entropy-producing process of
information destructuring—but “trash can” sounds less intimidating so we tend to call it that
instead. When applied to digital visual artifacts, the term “painting” is itself a kind of
skeuomorphic linguistic residue, operating the way we refer to an iTunes download as a “record”
or an “album”, or how we “turn” “pages” while reading an e“book”. Just as the skeuomorphs of
the graphic user interface made computers much more relatable, the skeuomorphic tag “painting”,
when applied to the ways certain algorithms perform certain configurations of binary code,
presents an adaptive aesthetic prompt node in which “a certain type of aggregate behavior can
emerge from the stochastic, microlevel actions” of individual inputs (Miller and Page 46). This
emergent, gestalt iconography—an ontologization of binary processes—is more easily grasped
and appreciated by human cognitive capabilities when linguistically and visually subsumed under
the skeuomorphic word “painting” (Figure 4).
Figure 4: A prolegomenal attempt at diagramming the complex of oscillatory relationships and
dissolutions that constitute painting in the distributed field: aesthetic vectors of communicability in a state
of dynamic equilibrium with a linguistic skeuomorphism grounded in historical and discursive precedent.
[Credit to Rosalind Krauss for image inspiration]
Such prompt nodes thus serve the function of defining as painting something that involves
neither pigment nor stable surface. If post-Duchamp something previously not-art becomes art
when an artist declares it as such, does something not-painting—involving neither pigment nor
binder—become painting because an artist has declared it as such? While that may be the case, I
believe something more is at play. In his 1969 essay Situational Aesthetics, Victor Burgin wrote of
the importance of contextual cues in constructing an art experience:
Some recent art, evolving through attention both to the conditions under which objects are
perceived and to the processes by which aesthetic status is attributed to certain of these, has
Painting in the Distributed Field
9
tended to take its essential form in message rather than in materials … art as message, as
‘software’, consists of sets of conditions, more or less closely defined, according to which
particular concepts may be demonstrated. (894-895)
Though Burgin was discussing conceptual forms of art, the distributed painting is itself a
conditional prompt, a coalescent agent that embeds deep-structure algorithmic processes within a
recognizable discourse of painting that extends centuries into the past. This skeuomorphic locus
activates a swarm of ideas about painting through references to a picture plane, to colors, and to
other residual expectations of what painting “is.” Despite the radical differences in form, presence,
presentness and information capacity, it is by these cues—first among them the implicit
acceptance of the screen as a picture plane analog—that distributed painting operates within the
discourse of painting and not as digital art in general. The use of the skeuomorphic term
“painting” thus shears off extraneous information and limits possibilities, making an otherwise
supra-human and alien artform recognizable and coherent as “painting.”
Questions Raised by Distributed Painting
Though a relatively new field of artistic endeavor, distributed painting raises a number of
challenges and questions to the way painting is “supposed” to operate in the world. To barely
scratch the surface, some of these questions might be: How does painterly dispersion and
immateriality change the way an artist creates and communicates meaning?11 How is the viewer’s
subjective experience transformed if the artwork is experienced optically via touchscreen instead
of proprioceptively in a quiet, well-lighted gallery space? What will be the role of the artist/author
as technologies like eye-tracking become mainstream—when the painting viewed is able to look
back at the viewer—tracking areas focused on vs. areas ignored and adapting in real time
according to each viewer’s archived profile and subconscious preferences? What is the
relationship between distributed painting and the commodification of immateriality within the
commercial networks of neoliberalism?12 What happens when distributed painting’s algorithmic
complexity prompts the formation of semi-autonomous, self-encoded paintings—species of
aestheticized cellular automata or genetic algorithms—dispersed perhaps by way of
cryptocurrency block chain protocols or other forms of networks?
At the philosophical level, art’s compelling quality arises in large part from its
unfinalizable ambiguity—what we might call its epistemological, experiential wiggle-room—and
from the differential tensions between the expansive possibilities of content vs. the limitations of
the material itself. If—as per Kant, Bakhtin, Heidegger, Eco and others—art operates in large part
via ambiguity and the unfolding of open teleology, can a binary-based, algorithmic artform offer
true unfinalizable ambiguity or purposiveness without purpose, or merely the technologically
enframed representations of unfinalizable ambiguity or purposiveness without purpose?
Finally, today’s Internet is trapped behind glass; soon, however, the idea of keyboards and
touchscreens will seem as quaint as punch cards. What happens when painting is truly distributed,
perhaps by way of augmented everyware systems—defined by information architect Adam
11 Additional thoughts on this question can be found in my essay “Site/Non-Site/Website: Presence,
Absence and Interface in the Online Studio Critique,” in the anthology The Art of Critique: Reimagining
Art Criticism and the Art School Critique. Ed. Stephen Knudsen. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press. Print.
12 If much 1960s art favored difficult-to-commodify dematerialization over painting’s easily commodified
object status, distributed painting allows the commercial artworld to have its cake and eat it too: the work is
definable—and sellable—as painting, but is immaterial and thus inexpensive to transport.
Painting in the Distributed Field
10
Greenfield as “information processing embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life”
(18)? What would an ambient form of painting look like? In a Heideggerian sense, how would it
come-to-be-in-the-world as art? Would such atmospheric, aesthetic and informational diffusion
liberate art as form, or will it dilute art into meaninglessness?
Conclusion
Painting in the distributed field marks the latest stage in a serial decentering—from
transcendent object to specific object to dematerialized concept; from discursive prompt node to
communicable network topology to momentarily-crystallized algorithmic representations of
aesthetic experience. Disengaged from static form through a sequence of reterritorializations: from
dematerialization to immateriality to virtuality, from centralized to decentralized to distributed—
such work operates through an inversely-proportionate relationship between materiality and
information capability barely held in check by linguistic notions that discursively bind it to earlier
forms of two-dimensional image creation. More than a change of the object status of painting
itself, however, the transition from the static picture plane to contingent screenspace changes the
relationship between artwork and viewer as well, from the ostensibly autonomous artwork of late
modernism, through the theatrical spaces of pluralism, to temporary autonomous interzones13 of
experiential and discursive flux.
13 Apologies to Hakim Bey, re: “temporary autonomous zone”.
Painting in the Distributed Field
11
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