Painting in the Digital Age: Redefining the Medium's Relationship to its History, Materiality, and Ideas of the Temporal

The essay explores the current relationship between painting and photography and particularly the relationship painting has to the digital. The core of the text investigates the current position of the material practice of painting in relation to screen-based digitisation. Taking examples from contemporary practices the essay examines painting's continuing capacity for reinvention by being open to that which might be "alien" to it. Cultural commentators note that painting's relationship to historical frameworks centres on the "atemporal"- that contemporary painting resides within a horizontal network of visual source material. Painters can now absorb the visual culture all at once-laterally-rather than having to look to artistic influences historically (and understand its progression sequentially). Painters now have immediate access, through the Internet, to an infinitely vast repository of two dimensional visual material: photography, video, film, painting, digital. Moreover, painters are eagerly embracing this rapidly expanding resource-especially the"new" visuals that digitised imagery has to offer-as a means by which to reinvent the languages and material practices of painting. Of particular fascination for painters the paradox of the time-based, mediated and autographic nature of painting appropriating the contrasting immediacy of the destabilised digitised image. The reinvention of the language of painting reinvigorates the medium and maintains its position amongst other art practices as a valid form of interpreting and shaping the world.