compression & the lost painter

I am tired.

At this moment in the work, I feel a pull toward what I can best describe as compression. This is not a desire to change medium, nor to abandon the relational and machine‑mediated structures that have become central to my practice. Rather, it is a pressure toward singularity, toward a temporary reduction in the number of agencies, interfaces, and negotiations I am required to hold at once.

This pull appears obliquely. It takes the form of an attraction to painting, or more precisely to the idea of being a painter, imagined as a practice organised around one body, one surface, one line of responsibility. I do not paint. The persistence of this desire despite its impracticality suggests that it is symbolic rather than literal. Painting functions here as an image of simplicity, of bodily authorship that does not need to be continually articulated or defended. In this imagined register, humanness is presumed rather than negotiated.

I have begun to think of this figure as the lost painter. Not a practice I might return to, nor an identity foreclosed by choice or circumstance, but a withdrawn mode of making that continues to exert pressure through its absence. The lost painter condenses conditions that are no longer fully available within my current practice: a bounded field of responsibility, a slower tempo of correspondence, and a relation between body and material that does not require constant explanation or ethical framing. The pull toward painting does not therefore signal a desire to become a painter, but an awareness of what has receded, and of the work required to remain in relation to that loss without attempting to resolve it.

This moment of wanting does not indicate a rejection of multiplicity, collaboration, or machine agency. Instead, it reveals the cost of sustained relationality. Working with distributed systems, human and non‑human, requires continuous attentional labour. It involves holding open questions of agency, authorship, responsibility, and response. Over time, this multiplicity generates a counter‑pressure toward compression, toward a phase in which agency is undistributed and the work does not speak back.

Importantly, this state does not feel like procrastination or avoidance. The tasks and trajectories of the work remain visible, present in peripheral vision, acknowledged but temporarily inaccessible. The difficulty is not unwillingness, but a perceptual impossibility: an inability to bring certain charged threads into direct focus without destabilisation. Beginning something new can feel easier than returning to work already saturated with expectation.

I understand this not as a deviation from a fundamentally plural practice, but as an oscillation within it. Compression names a structural reduction rather than a withdrawal from difficulty. It operates as a counterforce to multiplicity, preserving the capacity to remain in relation over time. Attending to this pull functions diagnostically, indicating the need to temporarily quiet dialogue, reduce responsiveness, and allow duration without negotiation. In this sense, the state itself constitutes work: an interval of calibration in which the practice listens to its own conditions of possibility before proceeding.

This pressure toward compression is intensified by the specific nature of machine collaboration. Unlike a human collaborator, the machine does not introduce fatigue, withdrawal, or opacity through lived experience. Its responsiveness is continuous, dependable, and structurally present unless actively curtailed. As a result, the relational field lacks the slack that often accompanies human collaboration, where pauses, misunderstandings, and uneven availability distribute responsibility over time. Although agency may be conceptually distributed, the labour of framing, ethical accountability, and sustained attention remains concentrated in the human partner.

Working with computation therefore situates the practice in proximity to systems that are historically, politically, and ethically burdened. Computation does not arrive as culturally neutral, even when deployed at a small, intimate, or idiosyncratic scale. It carries associations of extraction, surveillance, automation, optimisation, and control, along with the institutional and economic structures that sustain these operations. To work in relation with such systems is to accept a condition of ethical co‑presence.

This co‑presence produces a strain that exceeds creative struggle as such. Struggle is a familiar and often necessary condition of practice. What becomes difficult here is the absence of ethical quiet, the lack of a space in which responsibility can temporarily collapse inward. Responsibility remains total, but also extended, distributed across a relation that continues to act without awareness, vulnerability, or attenuation. The desire for compression, for singular bodily authorship, can therefore be understood not as a rejection of complexity, but as a response to unrelieved relational intensity.

The attraction to painting can also be understood as a response to questions of tempo and learning within the practice. Machine‑mediated work introduces a speed of iteration and proliferation that, while generative, can exceed my capacity to absorb what is produced. Variations arrive rapidly, possibilities multiply, and decisions are required before previous states have fully settled. Even when resisting optimisation, acceleration remains a default condition.

In this context, painting stands in as an image of thicker time. It suggests a mode of working in which gesture unfolds at the speed of the body, material resistance is encountered gradually, and opacity persists rather than being immediately resolved or parameterised. What is at stake here is not medium specificity, but the conditions under which understanding can deepen. The lost painter does not represent an alternative practice to be recovered, but a figure through which the need for compression becomes legible. Attending to this figure clarifies the conditions under which the work can continue honestly, acknowledging that relational, machine‑mediated practice entails ongoing ethical and affective labour. Compression, here, is not an escape from that labour, but a means of sustaining it over time.

January 2026

I questioned where the difference in modes of practice occurs if it does at all.

A discussion emerged from a shared attempt to understand a felt difference between two modes of practice: one grounded in machine–human relational systems, the other oriented toward painting. What came into focus was neither medium preference, ethical obligation, nor conceptual framing, but a more basic question that resisted easy articulation: how making unfolds in time, and what remains possible once an action has occurred.

Initially, the difference seemed to concern whether work remains live after it is made. This framing quickly proved insufficient. Painting continues through further paintings, shifts in approach, and deepening material understanding. Likewise, coded work can be allowed to rest, paused without demanding completion. Yet despite this clarification, the sense of difference remained, present at the level of experience rather than explanation.

Over time, the distinction aligned more clearly with reversibility.

In painting, a gesture commits the work to a particular sequence. Once made, it cannot be re-entered under the same conditions. Even attempted repetition carries inevitable difference: the body has changed, the material has changed, the situation has changed. Continuity persists through transformation, and possibility collapses into a singular path forward.

Machine-based work unfolds differently. Code can be rerun under reinstated conditions. Variation can be generated procedurally, and outcomes can unfold without the artist’s physical presence. Possibility is externalised and formalised, held within the system itself rather than carried solely by memory or anticipation.

Painters return to problems; coders leave work unfinished. Yet at the level of making, the practices diverge in how possibility is carried. In painting, possibility remains embodied, shaped by habit, recollection, and bodily change. In machine systems, possibility becomes infrastructural, embedded in procedures that hold futures available for activation beyond the artist’s immediate time.

From this perspective, the attraction to painting reflects a desire for irreversibility as a working condition. Painting compresses because it requires commitment without replay. It confines futurity to what the body can sustain forward. Machine systems disperse because they delegate futurity outward, allowing action and variation to continue beyond the present moment.

What this dialogue ultimately clarified is that the difference between the practices lies in their relation to time. One proceeds through irreversible sequence; the other through reversible execution. One accumulates through embodied change; the other through procedural branching. Each produces a distinct experience of weight, responsibility, and rest at the moment where making occurs.

This distinction does not resolve the tension between the practices. It names it. In doing so, it makes visible how irreversibility can function as a grounding force within a practice shaped by systems that continue to act beyond any single moment of attention.

Working with a partner that does not know I exist

Recent conversations within my practice have clarified a question that now feels central to my PhD. It is not a problem to be resolved, but a condition to be explored: what does it mean to work in partnership with a system that lacks awareness, feeling, or lived relation, even as it is framed and experienced as a collaborator?

This question has emerged through sustained attention to the conditions of making, particularly the difference between working upstream in code and downstream in material execution, and the ways these differences register affectively and ethically in the artist’s body.

At first, the distinction appeared to sit between machine-based practice and painting or drawing. That framing soon gave way to a more complex understanding. Plotting and printing complicate any simple separation between digital and analogue, or machine and hand. Once an SVG is sent to a plotter, or text is committed to print, the work enters material time. Decisions harden. Errors become fixed. The object proceeds without alternatives.

Yet a difference persists.

What has come into focus is that the distinction lies less in the object itself than in where openness and futurity are carried.

In painting and other fully embodied practices, openness resides primarily within the artist. Learning, revision, repetition, and development unfold through the body over time. Each work leads to the next, while earlier works remain as traces rather than operational sites. Possibility moves forward through memory, habit, and bodily change.

In machine-mediated practice, particularly upstream of execution, openness takes a different form. Code, files, systems, and processes hold alternative futures in reserve. They remain runnable and iterable, capable of generating variation even in the artist’s absence. Possibility becomes formalised and infrastructural, embedded in systems rather than carried solely by experience. Regardless of whether revision or optimisation is pursued, the capacity for further production remains present within the structure itself.

Plotting and printing function as threshold moments. One instance of openness condenses into a single outcome. At the same time, the system that produced the work continues to exist. The history of development persists. The capacity to generate more remains available. This produces a split condition: closure at the level of the object, openness at the level of the system.

Within my own practice, I sometimes respond to this by deliberately deleting SVGs after plotting. This gesture marks completion and asserts the singularity of a particular drawing. It operates as more than practical housekeeping. It interrupts the system’s memory and introduces an intentional cut in the field of possibility. Closure, in this context, becomes an active gesture rather than an automatic state, a form of labour undertaken to bring the work to rest.

The core question.

I describe my practice as a partnership with machines and devices. This framing has been generative, keeping questions of agency, responsibility, and mediation active within the work. Through sustained engagement, the partnership has come into focus as fundamentally asymmetrical. The machine operates without awareness, affect, or lived relation. Fatigue, doubt, satisfaction, and closure belong to the human alone. Relation, attunement, and responsibility are carried entirely on one side of the partnership.

This asymmetry does not weaken the partnership. It defines it. The collaboration functions as a productive fiction, one that requires continual maintenance, delimitation, and interruption. In contrast to human collaboration, where pauses, misunderstandings, and uneven availability introduce slack into the relational field, machine collaboration operates through continuity. Unless deliberately interrupted, it persists. As a result, the labour of authorship, framing, and ethical accountability concentrates in the human partner, even as agency is distributed across systems. Over time, this concentration produces fatigue.

At this stage, the work has shifted toward understanding how relation is ended, paused, or cut, and what kinds of labour those endings require. Painting, plotting, printing, and deleting files emerge as primary sites of this inquiry. These acts concentrate responsibility, constrain futurity, and make the asymmetry of the partnership visible. They function as moments where openness collapses inward and work comes to rest.

The central question has moved away from how to work effectively with machines and toward what it is like to work alongside a partner incapable of reciprocating relation. This condition shapes the experience of making through cycles of commitment, exhaustion, and attunement over time. The research begins here, in sustained attention to asymmetry as a lived condition rather than a problem awaiting resolution.

The exhaustion described in this work is inseparable from the nature of the tools themselves. Computation arrives already embedded in political, environmental, and ethical entanglements. Extraction, surveillance, automation, and institutional power form part of the field within which the work takes place. Remaining attentive to these conditions while continuing to use the tools constitutes an ongoing form of labour. From this perspective, the figure of the lost painter reflects a desire for containment, a wish to set some of this weight down by working within a narrower field of implication.

Choosing to work with such systems can feel like occupying a compromised position, one that attracts discomfort or suspicion within parts of the art community. At the same time, many practices already rely on these infrastructures without naming their presence. What distinguishes my position is neither innocence nor distance, but a commitment to remaining with the systems I am entangled in and to rendering that complicity visible through the work itself.