Portable Document: Thinkings & Makings

This practice-based residency at Old Bank Studios, Penryn, explored the philosophical agency of paper, focusing in part around the symbol of the PDF but also more broadly around some of the themes it encapsulates.

Paper mobilises, connecting its users’ voices with readers and spectators across time and space. Paper is multi-purpose: it is simultaneously ancient yet contemporary, cheap yet priceless, durable yet vulnerable; it is both originals and copies, classlessness and luxury; it constrains and yet it also liberates. Paper is a surface and a space – and perhaps, a prosthesis.

In the digital era, as we move from writing with fountain pens on real surfaces, to a form of writing that exists beyond physicality (no ink or paper, unless we press print), I’m curious about how we think of and perceive this new surface that we write upon and how we behave in its witness. As a child of the 70s and 80s, in the same way that I grew up caught between Imperial and Metric systems of measurement (never quite fluent in either, sort of understanding both), I now find myself in a similar position: suspended between analogue and digital. What does it mean to live in ’digital times’? How do I understand what paper might be in these digital times via manual and analogue methods of production? The tests and experiments shown at Old Bank Studios are considerations and starting-points in how to physically realise ideas about the qualities of paper in its digital guise – its mobility, its spatial qualities, its limitations, its expanse – and how I might repurpose these for other acts.