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Manual

for Reading of the Picture Copied from a Manual
by Jelena Radić

1. Original State:

Picture was copied from the Tampax tampons manual. It is one of the coloured drawings that are explaining usage of the bought product. In the original it consists of:

a simple, black and white linear drawing:

...with white and yellow ground:

...with blue and red raster over it:

When these three layers are printed together the following picture emerges:

2. First Step of Processing: the scanning of the picture

There are a number of ways to enlarge or reduce the format of the picture, and each one of them generates consequences in the further forming of it. The visible consequence arising from computer scanning is the decomposition of the image that is manifested through it's falling apart into thousands of pixels with a possibility of 16,7 million colours, comparing to combination of three mentioned above.
Scanning of the picture could be described as a translation of it to the language understood by computer. Through the process of scanning, the document is being enlightened - similar to the process of photography, only this time, it isn't chemical reaction that produces the picture - the image is created by the electrical impulses that form electronic file in the computer memory. This file consists of pixels (pixel ? picture element), the smallest unit of computer screen. So, pixels are very small one-colour squares, whose number depends on the resolution (number of pixels per square centimetres - pxs/cm), and the resolution determines quality of the picture.
Picture becomes a number - consequence that isn't visible, but nevertheless, had occurred by using the computer scanner. Every computer file is just a long line of zeros and ones, and as the rest of them, picture also became a code in a binary system.

3. Enlargement of the Picture through a Computer Program

If the Picture was printed again without any changes (format size, resolution...) there wouldn't be any visible difference between the original and the copy. But, if some of these elements are changed, the difference might occur in a very radical way.
Original size of the Picture was 1.83 x 3.05 cm, (what became through the scanning process - 866 x 1443 pxs, while the resolution was 472.41 pxs/cm (2636,75 is the number of pixels in all)).
The picture was enlarged over a hundred times, to the size 200 x 333,33 cm (300 x 500 pxs), and the resolution was reduced to 1,5 pxls/cm (150 000 is the number of the pixels after the enlargement). Through this procedure pixels became very visible (their size is 6,67 mm).
Decomposition of the sight is the consequence of the simultaneous enlargement of the image and the reducing of its resolution.

4. The New Printing of the Digitally Processed Picture

Printing was the next step in the processing of the Picture. It was printed on the Ink Jet plotter in the three parts horizontally divided (which is visible in the final version of the Picture - oil on canvas, in the change of the local colour tone and gamma).
The height of the Picture is 200 cm, and the height of the printed parts of the Picture is 70 (x 2) and 60 cm. The width was supposed to be 333 cm, but the highest value that used printer acknowledged was approximately 327 cm, so the ends of the Picture (2,5 cm each) were cut off.
The part of the canvas was left unpainted due to this misfortune, and this white margin functions as another sign of printing process that this picture has gone through.

5. Painting after the Printed Patten

Oil on canvas is the last of the media used for realization of the Picture. Printed material was set on the canvas, and the Picture was copied directly from the print, square-by-square, line-by-line. Doing so, even the one who paints becomes a media oneself, doing nothing but mechanically copying an image that already exists like print. Gradually destroying the print, (when a line of pixels was copied, it was cut off so that another line could be copied) at the end, process of painting actually swallowed it, but it's still present and visible on the Picture.
With this last step in producing of this work certain excess arose, which can be perceived in the quantity of expended handwork - it never had to be painted, it could exist in the media of print. Here, painting is an excess that dialectically binds the scheme of the computer print (made out of pixels) and the content of the picture (a manual) personifying it completely by its characteristics as a media. Stroke of a brush and pixel, diametrically opposed in their chronological historical media usage, first marked as completely traditionalistic, and the second one as the most contemporary media, in this case coexist together in a perfect equilibrium, they could not survive without each other; at the same time they deconstruct and construct the picture. They unite and separate two phenomena that are combined in picture - the content (image) and the media (painting).
The content of the Picture, as a part of everyday life of the contemporary woman (tampons as a mass consumer merchandise appeared for the first time during the 30-ies of the 20th century), is accented with alternate horizontal and vertical brush strokes, through which the process of overlapping of the threads in weaving is being imitated as part of everyday life of the women of the past.

Jelena Radic