A painting exists within its frame, its borders or edges, where the painting begins and ends. A visual reality within these borders. It also exists as an object within an environment, within the context of what is real around it. A painting's edge is part of the illusion or potential illusion of the medium itself. The paint can be coerced into representing almost any ³thing². A ³real² image, or simply the shape and texture of the thing itself; the painting.

It is represented is in the world - that which surrounds the painting, that which is bordered as outside - in a negative sense by the positive edge of the painting and somehow, the world around the painting is also represented by the painting. The edge - no more than the stage of the theatre - is an aid to the composition of the painting, a frame, similar to that of a photograph, that of the film screen, that of television. The means of mechanical reproduction have imitated the result of painting methods, they have drawn upon the history of painting as a resource for their own development. They have evolved to replicate the individual nature of paint: the texture, the style, the representation. They have also provided their own individual natures from which painting has replicated itself.

Painted images conferred onto themselves the cultural status to which the original desire for the image aspired often through historical provenance rather than subject matter or content. Our understanding of ancient painting is a very general ritualistic one, a spiritual one, an ingnorant one, one to which we also associate "ethnic" art in contemporary culture. This perspective is held in balanced by the cultural imperative of the logical/rational understanding to which our culture aspires. So, the perspective from which what is viewed is seen predetermines how the painting/object is perceived interpreted, and contextualized in its and our - environment.

The environment is defined as beginning at the edge of the painting. If we speak in the context of the painting only, then we generally stop at its edge, we attempt to see it in isolation. Yet we are mistaken. We provoke a response to the work in ourselves which we have learnt habitually to expect. We decipher intentions and meanings through our cultural logicalism, as any viewer will. All cultures have some form of philosphical ideaology through which the individual or group deciphers the signs in the world around it.

"The distracted gaze"

Walter Benjamin described the "distracted gaze" as isolated from experience. Adjustments in peception are made to make sense of experience, or to make structure around it. The sense of time that refers to the rhythm of production - factory time, assembly line time - also refers to the rhythm of motion pictures.

Through film, capitalism gives back in visual production what experience it takes away in mass production. In this sense, the widening gap between economy and culture - in capitalism - results in "thwarted technologies" being unleashed. The technological appearance of the Gulf war, the new images which result from technology in conflict.

Shocks to the environment are mimicked by film, positioning "humanity" where it can now view itself experiencing its own destruction as an aesthetic experience - an object of spectacle of/for itself.

Mechanical reproduction heightens perceptual ability, and at the same time aesthetics become anaesthetic.

Dialectic Imagery: imagery which simultaneously represents the past, present, and future. It rises from the idea of a memory perceptability, which is in the subconscious and only arises in extreme circumstance, i.e. moments of danger, burning oneself, etc.

Paintings are included in the context of signs in the world. Their edge, their frame, doesn't exclude them from the world around them. Their context cannot be isolated, their location is as much a part of them, as they are of their location. This siting is crucial to our understanding of cultural artefacts like painting, and any other object to which significance is conferred.

Often it is the making or manufacture of the work which is emphasised by the artist. The process entailing "getting as close as you can" to the object desired, confers a relationship of intimacy on the interaction between the artist and material or medium.

This interaction or forming, is promoted through the actual work, and by the structures which surround the work i.e. the gallery situation, the location of the display.

"The butterfly effect" is a metaphor used by Chaos scientists, its premise is the immeasurable yet possible effect of a butterfly's flight over the Amazon having some effect on the outcome of tornadoes over mid-western North America.

This not only has implications for the perception or observation of physical effects in science, but similar ones for perception itself, in any form. To search for cause and effect in any context means coming across -at some point - an observation of something whose shear complexity or simplicity cannot be fathomed, or which breaks an understood pattern of order and become chaotic or random because of our limitations of perception or understanding.

A painting which is representational or photographic, will break down under close inspection from the image of a view of objects to an image of a view of paint itself, its texture and colour revealed in a detail and the image of the painting referring not to the object or view, but to paint, its history, its present, its feel, its own meaning. Like the dots of a photo zoomed up close, the structure of the medium reveals itself.

The tool of this object, perhaps the brush, refers the eye to the body, the human body which both perceives and makes the painting. That direct relationship is further distanced in newer technologies. The tools imitate body functions, the eye, the camera, the image and manipulation, the tools where the body is an awkward necessity, as opposed to the tools which the body is needed to master.

From Shaping to Programming.

the four dimensions height width breadth and time

the illusion of space

the mark, the line...

m.d.