For James Gardiner, digital fabrication shifts the unconsciousness of automatic drawing towards the spectral ticks of our digitalised age. His drawings are inspired by the phenomenon of Pareidolia, where meaningful forms are found in ambiguous, random patterns. These forms diffuse into topographic landscapes and pixilated portraits, which are then developed into three dimensions on a robotic cutting machine (CNC router). The spindle of the CNC router carves into the wood as it follows the artist’s fractured grids. In Presence Pr23-01 (2023), the darkened wood stains and embedded pigment render what could be the murky form of a masked figure or a crumbling mountainside; the possibilities of Pareidolia leave this reading open. Here, the deep gouges from the machine automate the artist’s subconscious into a digital hivemind. 

It is a clever expansion of the surrealist tradition, in a way that bucks at Walter Benjamin’s fear that mechanical reproduction would devalue the “aura” of a work of art. Instead, like spirit photography, mechanical tricks are used to capture the sinister anxieties that creep up from our co-dependency with technology.