Digit(al) Drawings

The inspiration for these iPad drawings comes from both the tradition of detailed scientific botanical drawings and the elaborate cellular intricacies of contemporary biology and gene research. The relationship between organic matter and personal technology is explored; the origins of each contain a similar precise, complex and yet mysterious beauty.
 


"Gregg's choice of the iPad as a medium and electronic media as a means of distribution reflects what artists have always done in the face of new technologies - figure out a way to utilize them in a way that also advances new aesthetic possibilities. The iPad marks a new phase in personal computer interaction because its interface is based on direct tactile engagement rather than mediation through a keyboard. Liberi capitalizes on this by employing various apps that allow him to generate new forms, textures and colors through timeless gestural drawing techniques with the added intimacy of touching the screen directly with his fingers, rather than through a brush or a pencil. The results are a hybrid of the biomorphic, mathematical, and exquisitely luminous. Like newly discovered organisms from a deep-sea canyon, the images appear as though suspended in the actions that formed them.
 
The immediacy and intimacy by which these drawings are made reflects our growing relationship with, and interdependence on, technology. Developments in fields such as genetics and medicine have increasingly pushed us toward a reliance on integration with technology as a means of existence. In the future, it may not just be your smartphone that you can’t live without. Nanotechnology promises the potential to repair damaged cells, combat cancer and prevent disease. In the form of gene therapy, it also offers the possibility of entering the body, altering threatening medical conditions, or even reconstructing the genome. Appropriately, each of Liberi’s drawings is accompanied by a sequence of letters and numbers, taken from a gene database that he searches after free-associating during the process of making the day’s drawing."

– Kenn Bass, artist and writer