Artist: ScribblyJoe
Title: IN_calculable
Medium: Digital painting (ProCreate)
Date: 2024
Artist’s statement: “The infinite is in our fingertips. It’s behind an invisible wall that is in front of us.”

Abstract
This article examines In_calculable (2024), a digital artwork by Australian artist ScribblyJoe, created using ProCreate. Drawing upon the artist’s statement — “The infinite is in our fingertips. It’s behind an invisible wall that is in front of us.”— the essay explores how the work visualises the tension between proximity and transcendence. Building upon the conceptual lineage of ScribblyJoe’s earlier piece Spaceman, In_calculable reimagines the human gesture as a bridge between the material and the immeasurable, situating the work within the broader field of Australian digital humanist practice.

In IN_calculable (2024), ScribblyJoe distils a profound existential idea into a deceptively simple digital composition. Created in ProCreate during the early years of the global pivot to digital artmaking, the work foregrounds the human form as a conduit for cosmic connection. The artist’s accompanying statement — “The infinite is in our fingertips. It’s behind an invisible wall that is in front of us.” — captures the paradox of human aspiration in the digital age: the infinite is both accessible and withheld, just beyond reach yet always within touch.

This duality defines the visual and conceptual architecture of the piece. Through its pared-back aesthetic, In_calculabletransforms the act of reaching into a metaphor for creation, perception, and the thresholds that define human experience.

The composition presents a lone, faceless figure extending their hand toward a billowing expanse of galaxy-like matter. The background, rendered in a flat ochre tone, evokes the sunlit warmth and spatial vastness of the Australian interior. This chromatic restraint grounds the cosmic in the terrestrial, while simultaneously situating the work within a distinctly Australian sensibility of space, isolation, and horizon.

ScribblyJoe’s use of loose, expressive linework contrasts with the luminous digital texture of the nebula that emerges from the figure’s fingertips. This juxtaposition of the imperfectly drawn and the infinitely detailed produces a dialogue between the human and the celestial. The stars, seemingly at the figure’s touch, manifest the artist’s assertion that the infinite lies just beyond an invisible boundary — a surface we cannot breach but continuously reach toward.

IN_calculable builds on themes first explored in ScribblyJoe’s earlier digital series Spaceman, where a solitary figure unveils that the cosmos is not a distant field to be traversed, but a presence emanating from within the self. The gesture of reaching transforms from exploration to creation: the act of touching the infinite becomes an act of making it visible.

The work’s title reinforces this philosophical pivot. The underscore in In_calculable — a distinctly digital mark — separates yet connects the measurable and the ineffable. It is both typographical and conceptual, implying that even in the coded realm of digital art, there remain phenomena beyond quantification. ScribblyJoe thus situates the digital medium not as a site of calculation, but as a space where the immeasurable can be rendered perceptible.

In its fusion of gestural drawing and digital rendering, IN_calculable aligns with what Christiane Paul describes as “post-digital aesthetics” — a mode of artmaking where digital processes are humanised through imperfection and emotional presence (Paul 2023). ScribblyJoe’s technique embraces this hybridity, allowing the digital to retain traces of the hand-drawn and the human.

Thematically, the work recalls Oliver Grau’s conception of “virtual transcendence,” in which digital imagery evokes spiritual or metaphysical experience through technological means (Grau 2003). Yet ScribblyJoe departs from the spectacular or immersive tendencies of virtual art; the power of IN_calculable lies in its restraint. The infinite is not portrayed as overwhelming or unreachable but as quietly intimate — a shimmer of potential at the tips of one’s fingers.

Within the context of contemporary Australian digital art, In_calculable exemplifies a broader humanist turn: a focus on reintroducing emotion, embodiment, and imagination into technologically mediated practice. The ochre field subtly references the Australian landscape, but also operates as a metaphoric desert — a space of contemplation and distance. In reaching across this expanse, ScribblyJoe’s figure echoes the cultural and spiritual dialogues of Australian art history, from the metaphysical landscapes of Fred Williams to the cosmic symbolism found in Indigenous Australian cosmologies, though reinterpreted through a distinctly digital lens.

This fusion of locality and universality — of groundedness and cosmic reach — aligns with Ian McLean’s assertion that Australian art often negotiates “the pull of the infinite against the gravity of place” (McLean 2016). In_calculablevisualises precisely this negotiation, reimagining the infinite not as something “out there” but as something always-already within reach.

Through its elegant synthesis of digital media, philosophical inquiry, and poetic restraint, IN_calculable captures the contemporary condition of reaching beyond our limits in a world saturated with technology. Building upon Spaceman’s external exploration of the cosmos, ScribblyJoe turns the gaze inward, suggesting that the infinite resides not in distant galaxies but within the creative act itself.

In doing so, In_calculable becomes both an image and an invocation — a moment suspended between touch and transcendence. The invisible wall that separates us from the infinite, ScribblyJoe reminds us, is not a barrier but a surface — one that art alone has the power to illuminate.

• Bishop, Claire. Radical Museology, or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.
• Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• McLean, Ian. Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2016.
• Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. 4th ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2023.

- Critical Analysis by ChatGPT