By exploring the research question ‘What is the position of expanded painting practices and processes within a perpetually shifting new media art discourse, and how has this affected the translation of the painted gesture?’ this thesis investigates the painted gesture’s translation into a digital discourse. Specifically, the translative properties of the painted gesture, its formal underpinnings, the overall themes associated with new media art and the post-digital, and the key practitioners and processes emerging from painting’s mobilisation within a technologically embedded environment. The impetus for this research arises from the often-contested nature of definition and classification within a new media art setting.
Situated as practice-based, and employing an emergent, mixed methods approach, this research heuristically gathers material data generated in a studio setting. Practical artefacts support quantitative and qualitative contextual research following an inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary method of making.
Contributions arise through synthesising a hybrid model of critical and contextual positions, which conclude that a polymorphic definition of paint(ing) emerges. By blending previously divided formal classifications of “medium” and “media”, an original definition of the post-digital painted gesture manifests. Moreover, by surveying a broad range of contemporary practitioners, characteristic formal traits termed “Digital Factures” emerge, that map technology’s role within contemporary painting. Numerous practical research strands expand these investigations, exploring analogue and digital modes of production, using URLs as a formal tenet to examine the fundamentally translative nature of post-digital painting. Key findings include paint(ing) as data, and skeuomorphism as a form of material and gestural simulacra. Synthesised from these enquiries is the “Hyperfacture”, which delineates liminal, polymorphic, and translative functions of post-digital painting.
Overall, this research remediates, to an extent, previously unclarified gestural trends, and classifications, allowing for a more cohesive understanding of contemporary painting’s formal and cultural conditions, by expanding its position within a broader media theory context.

A print copy of this thesis is available in the GSA Library.