David Clarkson
After Icebergs: Allegories of Painting, Landscape and Digital Networks
My thesis examines the practical and theoretical implication of the Internet for contemporary landscape painting practice. Through a method of painting as research and self-reflexive critique, this study considers a digital painting practice that is linked to online databases by the mediation of landscape photographs and QR codes. The writing critically narrates the interdisciplinary remixing of hybrid positions that the connection of painted, natural and digital space entails. The actor-network-theory of social scientist Bruno Latour is used to support the analysis. Critical insight is developed using statements by modernist art critic Clement Greenberg, Internet pioneer Paul Baran, artists such as Gerhard Richter and Robert Smithson, in addition to key postmodernist texts by cultural theorists Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens and Paul Virilio, and interdisciplinary feminist theorist Karen Barad. The search for icebergs is a recurrent allegorical cipher in the thesis text and artwork.