Dan Kelly / reference / digital painting

I like to paint! Instead of canvas, brush and pigments, I sometimes use a laptop computer, a tablet and a large format ink jet printer. Painting with computer is related to painting with brush and pigments in that they are both methods of manipulating light - I lay down color and define forms by moving my hand, while looking at a subject. The difference is that traditional painting techniques result in a physical object, (a canvas covered with pigments for example), while painting with a computer yields a chunk of raw digital information.

Digital information is ethereal, it can be transmitted at the speed of light via fiber optic cable, broadcast into the cosmos with radio telescopes, assimilated into vast electronic libraries, copied with absolute fidelity or translated into physical space by a printer. Computer paintings do not have a unique 'original' - like a pigment covered canvas or a photographic negative. This is because digital information can be duplicated perfectly, and a single computer painting could potentially spawn an infinite number of originals.

My paintings are distributed globally through the world wide web, and live on thousands of personal computers and network servers. My work is constantly being copied, transmitted, transformed, materialized and annihilated. With all those countless manifestations winking on and off all over the earth, only five have been actually signed by me, the artist. These five singed paintings form a sequence.

If you buy into Dawkins and grant that information is alive, then the following paradox arises - although death is our destiny, we sweat divinity. The signpost up ahead, the ultimately uncollectable art. Proceed with caution.