I’ve never had difficulty accepting professionally pre-made materials and resources as an essential part of the creative procedures for producing artwork. Tubed paint, pre-stretched canvases, standardized paint brushes, these are common examples of methods painters and artists in general have accelerated developing their work. Ready-mades are also an established medium for art production. But through exploring digital platforms for production it is clear that there is no such thing as self-made content. Every part of any creative interface is a pre-made element, establishing constraints and parameters through professionally manufactured design tools. This is certainly ideal for any creative professional designing and interacting with digital products; honestly, the algorithms for oil paint and water color effects are impressively satisfying. I have made custom digital brushes from images and drawings to use in my digital work. Even with the procedure of creating brushes, the structure holds preset parameters for the style of application, spacial and angle distribution of the content within the stroke, etc. Making the whole process feel less like I was able to be innovative and more like I could make a small variation of what has already come to pass. Don’t get me wrong, this is good. I was attracted to the idea of building imagery from imagery to further nest remix concepts into the procedure and this does just that. If I can now be the DJ for making brushes, adjusting parameters with a sliding bar for a future performance, the next question is more about how long the song can be - or the image-generating/paining equivalent. Subsequently, the convenience and efficiency of image-generation mainly leads to an age-old question that painters love to ask: Where is the frame?

Perhaps by setting the terms ‘border’ and ‘frame’ to be synonymous, I can simply reference the length and width set by the document as the “frame” and call it a day. Sadly, that feels insufficient, especially as those parameters are adjustable by the whim of a keystroke. In painting, the frame is commonly mistaken for that decorative border around a work of art, but that is only a vehicle for the gallery to transition the work to the consumer. To skip some philosophical steps, I’d like to argue where the frame is by deciding what the frame is. The frame is a transition point, a space between moments. In this sense, today we can find the frame mounted around our screens/monitors. This interpretation of the frame puts artwork in every home, most peoples hands and simply makes it unavoidable. It’s been very interesting to see how galleries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, but at least now galleries are coming to grips with the fact that the space between what artist make and what is consumed isn’t always a physical space.