DRAWING B/LOG/BOOK 1- KW 16/ 17

Dr. Lina Tegtmeyer

"Ali - we are getting closer" - pram and clothes horse are converted into a hybrid vehicle with Rischka function....

(Backgrounding this format)

Dr. Lina Tegtmeyer

1) With globalization, scientific research and many areas of science are currently in a completely new form of crisis: Technological developments/”progress” and resulting consequences in the nation states in this world cause paradigm changes in the forms of knowledge creation, production, access and distribution. Concomitantly, a popularization of “knowledge” and science develops and presents itself. Information interchanges with knowledge and vulgarization of sciences. Materialization of “knowledge” and science seem uncontrolled and difficult to regulate; and its somewhat free travelling first class border crossing velocity goes beyond all existing imaginations of preceding organization of structure and knowledge systems within national and international democratic understanding of categorizing, allowing, producing and exchanging knowledge, science and free thinking.

2) A parallel development to this diffuse inflation of textual-language based “knowledge”, is the massive accumulation and equally uncontrolled, inflationary distribution wilderness of visual material, notably that of pixel-photographic type, such as digital photographs and moving images/film. Both, traditional media and the internet largely allow for and enable the mass culture phenomenon of seemingly unlimited mass spreading of amateur and professional photographic images. 

3) The Arts remain still largely positioned as dialectic counterpart to science, vehemently so in diverse discourses in Germany. The analogue hand drawing—especially the ones categorized as expressionist-experimental—is considered a particularly disreputable material for any kind of proof in science, media or academic context.

4) Ethnographic field work, however, has been working with hand-drawn sketching as method for taking notes since before the invention and mass production and easy-access use of photography. These notations were rarely presented as final results, though, rather they served as template, draft or memory. Oftentimes these were made not by researchers but by accompanying drawing experts.

5) In my research I experiment with experimental analogue hand drawing as research method since 2014. My interest lies in the immediacy of the sketch, and to work with its directness to document a moment, one moment of so many moments—unalterable as it passes by and equally leave/present the drawing unaltered. It is what it is, there is nothing more to it; it serves no further purpose, is not a vehicle to a final picture, a more detailed/comprehensive/naturalistic/… one.

The drawings are crafted in a situation. Some drawings are absolutely incomplete, for example, due to a situation that dissolves in front of my eyes when a person leaves the scenery. I usually produce a dense number of fast sketches and drawings that I collect in series according to date, place and time. At the end of a process, these are viewed/presented as complete incomplete series. No post-production. Part of my method is to achieve pure visual imagery notes instead of text-language notations— a demanding challenge, as I discovered, that I have so far not been able to translate into any satisfactory result.