Painting as a post-digital formalism

Abstract

The post-digital is a genre which, since the early 2000s, has gradually embedded itself within mainstream culture, saturating and influencing many faculties of knowledge, as a standardization of digital technologies: the aftermath of the Digital Revolution. The fine arts have borne witness to this cultural shift, readily accommodating post-digital thematics which have percolated into the field of painting and its continual expansion. The following article aims to define painting as a post-digital formalism by: chronologizing post-digital painting and its precursory technological and cultural developments to situate it within a wider historical canon; describing the translative capacity of contemporary painting (as an inherent feature of the post-digital painted gesture); and charting the shifting formal topography of painting resulting from the conflation of medium (the formal parameters of an artwork) and media (the networked, mass communicative status of an artwork). Finally, this enquiry synthesizes an expansion of characteristic post-digital formal traits termed herein as ‘Digital Factures’. Resultantly, an expanded Taxonomy of Digital Factures that maps technology’s role within contemporary painting is situated, providing a new insight as to the definition of painting’s expanding processes and trends in an age after new media.