Hatch Leaks

Mirna Udovčić's work Hatch Leaks will be exhibited on St Mark’s Square (Trg sv. Marka), in centre of Korčula. It can be accessed via mobile phones and other devices by connecting with the gray) (area Wi-Fi network. The exhibition marks the inception of the grey) (area’s Wi-Fi Gallery, which will be open permanently in the coming years. This new format will provide an innovative platform for digital artworks presented by the grey) (area, an association for contemporary and media art which also has an exhibition space in Korčula, The project has been undertaken in cooperation with the Format C artists association from Zagreb, and the Korčula Town Museum.

Hatching is the drawing technique by which artists use a dense concentration of parallel lines to denote shadows and dark areas. In architectural drawings, hatching is used to mark the various construction materials. For example, a pattern of oblique lines denotes concrete; crossed lines denote reinforced concrete; rectangular lines refer to brick.

Up until the 1980s, most CAD (computer-aided design) programmes worked on mainframe computers or minicomputers. In 1982, Autodesk released the AutoCAD drawing application for microcomputers, a programme that is still widely used on personal computers today. Instead of forming images using pixels, this system uses lines, in a way that is reminiscent of traditional drawing techniques. In the world of architectural drawing, manual work has been completely replaced by digital technology of this kind. Indeed the architect Mirna Udovčić uses digital technology in her everyday work. In practice however no system is perfect, not even a digital one. Udovčić has made creative use of the glitches present in the AutoCAD system to produce this series of digital prints. As Udovčić herself explains, "in this work there is a context in which a degree of geometric order can be read, and columns with axes can be inferred, but all of this is relativized by the hatching, which seems to have a mind of its own and resists any attempt at order imposed by the AutoCAD. Line drawing is in any case close to my graphic sensibility, and I have a feeling that this work fits in to the general continuity of my architectural drawing.”

The basic processes in “glitch art” involve extracting existing system errors and/ or programming the parameters of error. The first of these procedures is close to the objet trouvé method in contemporary art, while the second is close to (both analog and digitally) programmed and generative art. Both of these procedures are present in Udovčić’s works. Errors of display (whether of graphics cards, printers, or screens) are erratic and unpredictable, to be captured by glitch artists in an instant. The errors used in this series of works are those found in the digital document itself.

The digital gallery has been set up on Pivilion, a free and open operating system developed by Dina Karadžić and Vedran Gligo of Format C. The wireless local area network (WLAN) is freely available, and introduces digital artworks automatically, without a password or further action, to anyone connecting with the Wi-Fi network. In the coming years grey) (area’s Wi-Fi Gallery will be permanently available on Korčula’s St. Mark's Square, presenting works chosen by curators from grey) (area and Format C.

This exhiibition is part of the #pivilion_dot_net collective pavilion within The Wrong decentralized digital art biennale. #pivilion_dot_net presents works at as a distributed darknet accessible via the Tor browser: pivilionm4ymic2y3c3skywpbpnjhonbmjdfltyaxnnmok22bbtw5qad.onion

Darko Fritz

Artist statement:

“HATCH LEAKS  is a triptych. Using the AutoCAD engineering programme, three of the same objects were unsuccessfully hatched with different hatching techniques. Each hatch offered a different geometry of decay within the object. The work has a parasitic relationship with the office life of the architect. I myself am an employee of an architectural studio; an occasionally creative, but frequently anonymous technical drawer. Our drawings constantly change, as our projects change. They are in a constant state of development and adaptation. As the months go by, the drafts remain restless, absorbing the attention of their draftsmen. However, the everyday life of these drafts can be suddenly disrupted. The AutoCAD drawing programme is not perfect. Sometimes glitches occur that look interesting, like benign meteorological phenomena. This work involves glitch hatching, that is to say hatching that can sometimes spin out of control, leak out of its given shape and hatch the entire drawing. Such hatching lives a wild, rebellious life that resists the engineered exactness of technical drawing. Its aesthetics are unpredictable, and superior to the rest of the technical design. How did the glitch happen? A careless mouse click could have caused the hatching to leak out. I watch the disobedient hatching and it watches me back. I'm fascinated. I call colleagues over to look at it. We look. Then we go back to drawing. It’s just a glitch and I can remove it from the draft at any time. However the glitch is somehow precious, and is not simply just an accident. I watch how it behaves as I change its patterns from reinforced concrete to honeycombs, bricks, mesh, cork, gravel, grass ... Each offers its own elusive variation on decay. The glitch is my ally, a stroke of luck, a form of creative revenge. Together with the glitches, I feed parasitically on the professional pressures of constant productivity and focused engineering work – work which of course lies within the permitted limits laid down by the health and safety rules regarding computers. I make minimal refinements to the thickness of the lines in the final print and thus prepare HATCH LEAKS for independent life. Architecture is a methodical and exact profession, which leads to the preparation of designs, and sometimes also their fulfillment. With HATCH LEAKS I record the exact opposite - the instability and lability of the programme with which the architectural design is created. Through the work I try to capture unusual moments in the visual environment of the architectural process. The imperfection of the programme is a document, that is to say, a parasite, of a certain time.”

Mirna Udovčić