■ Traversing the Threshold

Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Leipzig), September 2018; Exgirlfriend Gallery (Berlin), June-July 2018

Marcus Nebe and Liat Grayver, Ink Spread 3:44, 2018

Made with the collaboration of the e-David Project (University of Konstanz) and video artist Marcus Nebe, Traversing the Threshold (2018) is a room installation of robotics-assisted calligraphic works and videos. The works stretch into and expose the temporal and physical space of creative process through the media of painting and video.

What could have been executed as one painting constructed of thousands of brushstrokes has instead been decomposed and distributed over numerous sheets of rice paper. Different sections of the master particle generator image were cropped and the individual particles were translated into single brushstrokes (assigning parameters such as, for example, the size, length, pressure and speed variation of the strokes), before the data was sent to the robot for the final execution.

The individual paper works are extracted from a complex of computer-generated particles (Simulation of a World Overview, 2018) according to Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. Scaled to different sizes, each can be viewed not only as an individual work but also as part of the modular wall installation. Nebe’s video compositions utilize close-up footage he made of the ink and paper interacting as Grayver created the works manually, offering intriguing temporal perspectives on the material’s response and impact on the act of painting.

The fragility of the ink-infused rice paper work in particular stands in sharp contrast to the industrial robot used to create them. As with Japanese calligraphy (the reference is obvious and undeniable), the brush trajectories and the ink’s behaviour as it penetrates the surface are here of several magnitudes more importance than the perception of the object itself.