Simulation Sketchbook
Works in Process

Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process was a group exhibition presented with Feral File, exploring the forms a sketch can take for artists working in new media and digital art. It featured eleven new works and was accompanied by an LED billboard campaign in Downtown Los Angeles.

Curator Jesse Damiani on the exhibition

“An artist's sketchbook is one of the most precious spaces for research and experimentation. In its ideal, the sketchbook is an intimate domain where artists capture ideas, test compositions, wrestle with subjects, and scribble marginalia, engaging in an ongoing inner dialogue that audiences don't witness.

In analog forms, sketches are highly correlated with drawing on paper. Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process poses a simple question: what does a sketch look like for an artist working in more experimental modes like digital art and time-based media? What is a sketch when it's not a conventional drawing?

Whether they take the form of code, video, 3D models, immersive spaces, or multimodal explorations that don't fit a neat categorization, these ‘sketches’ are no less integral to the development of the respective artist's body of work. Because of their relative novelty among audiences, the technical and conceptual merits of these process-oriented arts can be difficult to grasp, leaving underlying poetics invisible or misinterpreted. Worse still is the assumption that this work is tantamount to button-pushing, that machines are the true authors, trivializing the years spent developing a unique relationship with these materials. In this way, their sketches create a cascade of insight: regarding the art, the artist, and the new ways we might understand the relationship among ourselves and the tools of our daily lives.”