Disrupting traditional cartooning in the digital age

DISRUPTING TRADITIONAL CARTOONING IN THE DIGITAL AGE This exegesis identifies the changing nature of political cartooning in the digital age, and specifically the Closed Gestalt confines of contemporary Opinion Page cartooning, a specific discipline that has been my practice for the last 32 years for the national newspaper, The Australian. The daily workload consists of creating a cartoon for a prescribed space on the page. The image coinhabits and illustrates a singular opinion piece of writing. With the advent of new technology, and the availability of improved digital drawing tools, my practice broadened to encompass the use of time-based digital animation. Consequently, to go beyond the limitations of the Opinion Page working model, I proposed to The Australian to experiment with a process described as an Open Gestalt. The project was aptly called Work-in-Progress (W-i-P). My working process was to solicit multiple ideas from readers online, through social media and the newspaper’s website, to grow an expanding collaborative picture based on a chosen weekly theme or topic. In addition, during the course of each week, an animated video would be produced of the growing big picture. This practice-led process attempted to explore the phenomenology of ideas via an Open Gestalt framework, employing new communication technology and utilising innovative digital drawing tools. A necessarily fast-paced heuristic research method was employed to synthesise ideas into images. While experimenting with digital cartooning, using the latest software and hardware, I investigated key artistic precedents and the work of cartoonists that I found to be inspirational. At the same time, there were controversies surrounding the nature and role of political cartooning. I therefore explored the work of Australian cartoonists, Bill Leak and Mark Knight, as well as that of the French, satirical weekly newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. I felt that my evolving concept of collaborative cartooning, incorporating many opinions, might point to a process that would result in a concept of ‘civil cartooning’, even democratic art practice. To explore this process of collaborative picture making further, I set up and carried out tests within a leadership institution: the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra, and within a cultural setting: the Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney