>Ian Dawson
>And Travelling Often In The Cut We Make, 2023
Document produced for the award of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Abstract: And Travelling Often In The Cut We Make explores a performative and relational approach towards the use of digital imaging technologies such as Reflectance Transformation Imaging, Structure from Motion, and Fused Filament Deposition printing.
Through a series of iterative artworks, exhibitions and writings created over an eight-year period the research explores the entanglements of technical images and materiality. Drawing upon a diffractive methodology the work chronicles a continuous collaboration between artists and archaeologists which interlaces different theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary practices through one another; like overlapping ripples, to co-constitute productive situations where the effects of difference appear.
And Travelling Often In The Cut We Make takes its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Blight (1899) which bemoans the pervasiveness of new scientific methods in relation to innate experiences inside landscape itself. This seems to aptly raise the phenomena of Karen Barad’s agential cut which rather than marking an absolute separation proposes a cutting together/apart. The iterative nature of the artistic practice which underpins this body of research sees Dawson re-turning to this cut to perform it differently so that the environments where people and digital imaging meet cannot be disjoined from the mediations that occur within them.