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 The theme of the 3rd Montréal Biennial is drawing. In visual arts, some artists talk to us about their lives, about life, and to do this, drawing has traditionally been a privileged media, where expression is bared by the simplicity of the line. In the electronic art section, one work adapts this practice: Lia's Re-Move. Coming to grips with drawing in Web art, however, is not easy. Moving the media and its tools, paper to screen and pencil to mouse, drastically changes our concept of what drawing can or should be. Can we still call drawing a multimedia space built on a base of virtual objects, whether two- or three-dimensional? Is this not a bad stretch of the language? Or does this change in the media and tools merely point to a new era in the evolution of techniques? Moreover, drawing is by essence a very intimate form of personal expression favouring, through the very simplicity of its tools, the expression and sensitivity of the gesture, and letting emotion transpire through the line. Does the machine allow artists to express their emotions as sensitively? To answer these questions, it seems necessary to first review current Web art practices by looking at the way artists divert or skilfully adapt technological tools in their method of creation. We are then led to distinguish three types of approaches or trends in Web art closely or remotely associated with the practice of drawing: transposition, the interactive tool and adaptation. Transposition is the artist's appropriation of pre-existent digital images integrated into a virtual space. Such is the case of Myron Turner's project Animal Locomotion, which takes up the principle of Muybridge's images on the study of animal and human movement no longer on the basis of photographs but drawings. The interface proposes many drawings of moving animals the user can manipulate. Animal Locomotion is an obvious example of transposition: the artist draws, then scans the pictures that are integrated into the interactive interface. The process here is simple. It can be more complex by containing in addition to digitalization a digital transformation of the original image. Arturo Herrera built Almost Home on the principle of a bipartite space in which he uses drawings and illustrations of children's stories that have been digitized beforehand. The diptychs are made up of associations of truncated, coloured, scribbled images, transformed as much by hand as digitally. The resulting drawings no longer have anything in common with the original illustrations, but remain identifiable. This is not always the case, however, since by dint of treatments, filter appendages, enlargements, reframing, and graphic element additions, we sometimes end up unable to distinguish the nature of the original image. This is why other artists no longer use scanned drawings directly, but photographs that lose their identity to take up the appearance of drawings. Thus is the universe of Barbara Lattanzi's You Are Late, whose impoverished and simplified images only retain the intelligibility of volumes and forms through the spacing and density of black and white dots. Since they are not drawings to start with, these images do not truly become so with the transformations they undergo, but only appear to be. Drawings, but not really drawings. The use of digital tools produces a new sort of image that no longer belongs to the original or to any other form of traditional representation, and has no particular name … What we have called the interactive tool, for its part, is wholly derived from the technology and a reverse approach to drawing. Derived from technology because the idea from now on is to experiment with the creation of new drawing tools, and reverse approach because the artists no longer draw, but create these tools and make them available to users. These applications, small software jewels, offer net surfers the opportunity to experiment in turn with the media through the interface created by the artist. The resulting work, therefore, is no longer a finished, determined product. There are many such projects, among which we'll mention Joanna Berzowska's Computational Expressionism and Mario Hergueta's D_Raw, which both operate from the same principle. Computational Expressionism is made up of several modules the user is asked to experiment with to understand the tools and become familiar with this new method of drawing leading to the final module, which compiles the different parameters previously exploited. D_Raw is also made up of different small applications in which many parameters are predetermined, calculated and applied to the trajectory of the mouse then imitating the pencil: the firmness of the line, for instance, depends on cursor speed, graphic elements stress or enrich the line, thus different methods or systems make for as many styles. The user can write, doodle, erase, colour at leisure, even save his own drawing in the gallery provided for this purpose. Other applications of this type also integrate the community aspect of the network by proposing on-line interfaces for the creation of cooperative images. Such is the case of Andy Deck's Glyphiti, which gives the surfer an opportunity to insert graffiti into a common creative space. The page is divided into two identical squares: the first shows the full chessboard image; the second displays an enlarged detail chosen by the user and provides an opportunity to intervene in this part of the image and create his own graffiti. The user is free to draw in a blank box or build on someone else's creation. This work operates on a binary principle: a click on a white pixel produces a black pixel, and vice versa. Unlike the earlier-mentioned projects, Glyphiti is a work in progress since it is a single picture made up of the association of different drawings evolving according to the intervention of surfers. Adaptation is certainly the most obvious, yet the most ambiguous method. This is where we place the artists who draw with digital tools by merely shifting media and means. But in this case, to what extent can we still talk of actual drawing? Starting from the principle that drawing can be defined as a set of graphic forms composing a surface, many Web works can be considered as belonging to drawing. But it is not so, drawing remains a particular technique which can only encompass a few electronic works. Thus, drawing on the Internet is mainly associated with a method of narration. Juliet Ann Martin's Instant Future, for example, is a hyperlink project where surfing is built around drawings with which are associated scraps of handwritten texts. Other projects such as Haik Hoisington's Always Suspect and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's Six Guns: Tales From An Unfolded Earth are also focused on narration. Always Suspect is an animation film produced in vector drawing with Flash. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's work is an interactive comic strip, also produced in vector drawing. These works, therefore, adapt traditional techniques to digital tools, sometimes adding elements specific to these tools, like interactivity or forest. The narrative aspect may be less obvious at first sight in works like Yan Breuleux's HistoiresSansFin. This project uses drawings produced by machine, pictograms that build an interactive animation. Users can alter the paths of the pictograms and the pictograms themselves and end up building a semantic link between them. Other projects also adapt drawing by dwelling more on some aspects specific to the machine. Thus, the use of computer codes and languages and the manipulation of images or Web pages they allow can give rise to a new form of drawing. Vuk Cosic's now famous adaptations of ASCII images provide a good example. In an even more radical way, Alexei Shulgin's Form presents a concept that is surely very remote from traditional drawing, but that adapts this technique to HTML language. The page, reduced to its simplest expression, is made up of elements like buttons, check boxes, text fields or elevators. Assembled in different ways, these elements recreate forms and make up shapes resulting in what could be called HTML drawing. The upshot of this brief, but representative overview is obvious: Web artists, far from being content with the mere application of traditional techniques like drawing to a new medium, have been able to redirect those practices so that they take all their meaning in the context of this new medium that is Internet. They have thus undertaken to produce a new, contemporary imagery for the creation of a new art that never stops questioning its own practice in view of the specificity of its production methods for and by the Web, of course, but that also feels justified to claim its rightful place in contemporary art generally and in the debates that stir it.
Cécile Petit
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