Instructions to make an impression of the wall or other inane surface. Then an arrangement or recreation of the original surface(s) using your frottage drawings.

The Collins dictionary defines frottage as:

• The act or process of taking a rubbing from a rough surface, such as wood, for a work of art
• Sexual excitement obtained by rubbing against another person’s clothed body

It must be stated that for this instruction we are only interested in definition 1.

You will need:

• Several sheets of light-medium weight paper no smaller than 50 x 70 cm
• Graphite sticks, charcoal, wax crayons and or oil bars
• One or more wall, floor or any large-ish textured surface (doesn’t need to be flat but should probably be hard)

To Make a frottage drawing:

• Place paper over the wall or surface in a way that allows maximum contact
• Use a graphite stick, charcoal, crayon or oil bar on its side and make several purposeful passes rubbing back and forth over the back of the paper
• Apply pressure to pick up the texture of the surface behind the paper
• Repeat until you have a number of drawings

To Make a recreation of the original surface:

• Using your drawings, arrange them so they resemble the surface you took the impressions from
• Arrange them so they resemble a different surface
• Cut the drawings up into random-sized small pieces and arrange the cuttings to resemble the original drawing
• Arrange the cuttings randomly so they resemble something else

Think of things to do with records and data collection, archaeology and the prospective futures which may be speculated by gathering information from the past and present. The mark made by the rubbing of a wall may serve as a record of what is here now but which has not always been there and may not be in the future. Compare with what data means today and what it is to collect data. Is paper data safe or is it hackable? Is it worth anything?