David Hockney Hotel Acatlan: Second Day, 1984-5
David Hockney has never treated technology as something external to art. Across more than six decades, new tools appear in his practice not as symbols of progress or novelty, but as instruments for returning to a persistent concern: how we see, and how seeing might be made visible. From Polaroid cameras to fax machines to iPads, Hockney's engagement with technology reads less like a timeline of innovation and more like a series of lateral experiments, each circling the same perceptual questions from a different angle.
FrSave & closeactured Vision: The Polaroid Joiners
This attitude is already evident in his Polaroid works of the late 1970s and early 1980s. At first glance, the joiners appear photographic, but they resist photography's promise of instant coherence. Composed of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of images taken from slightly different positions and moments, these works fracture the visual field. Roads bend awkwardly, faces refuse symmetry, horizons stutter. For example, In Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, the Californian landscape becomes a patchwork of glances, each frame recording not only what was seen but where the artist stood when he saw it. The result feels closer to drawing or collage than to photography as traditionally understood.
Against Objectivity
What is significant about these works is not simply their visual effect, but the way they undermine photography's claim to objectivity. The camera, often assumed to deliver truth through mechanical precision, is here exposed as limited. Hockney uses technology against itself, revealing how conventional perspective flattens experience into a single, authoritative view. The visible seams between images matter: they announce the artist's presence and the passage of time. Looking becomes an active process, closer to drawing or collage than to photographic documentation.
Transmission and Fragility: The Fax Works
This impulse continues in Hockney's experiments with fax machines in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing directly onto fax templates, he transmitted images across long distances, often in real time. These works are modest in scale and resolution, their lines broken by interference and compression. Yet their interest lies precisely in this fragility. A fax drawing exists as an event rather than an object, defined by speed, loss and translation. In an era before ubiquitous digital communication, Hockney was already exploring how images circulate, degrade and reappear elsewhere, altered but still legible.
The fax works also foreground communication over permanence. They resist the aura of the unique artwork, instead emphasizing exchange and immediacy. In this sense, they anticipate later digital practices while remaining rooted in drawing as a fundamental act. Even as the medium changes, Hockney's hand remains present, adapting to the constraints of the machine rather than disappearing behind it.
Drawing on Glass: The iPhone and iPad
Hockney's turn to digital drawing tools in the 21st century, particularly the iPhone and iPad, might seem like a more decisive embrace of technology. Yet these works are best understood as an extension of concerns that have shaped his practice for decades. The iPad allows for direct engagement with colour and line, collapsing the distance between eye, hand and surface. Marks appear instantly, glow with internal light and can be revised without residue. Far from producing slick or impersonal images, this process results in works that feel immediate and intimate, often resembling sketches caught at the moment of their making.
Everyday Motifs, Digital Light
The subject matter of the iPad drawings is telling. Hockney returns again and again to landscapes, flowers, interiors and changing seasons. Sunrises and springtime trees recur, not as grand motifs but as daily observations. These images align Hockney with traditions of plein air painting and Impressionism, even as they are made on a luminous screen rather than canvas. Digital light replaces pigment, altering how colour behaves, but the underlying attention to atmosphere and temporal change remains consistent.
Hockney has spoken about the accessibility of these tools. An iPad, unlike oil paints or large studio spaces, offers a relatively low barrier to entry. This democratizing potential is central to his thinking. Drawing, for Hockney, is not a specialist activity but a way of engaging with the world, available to anyone willing to look closely. By treating consumer technology as a serious artistic medium, he challenges hierarchies that separate fine art from everyday tools.
Yet Hockney's engagement with technology is never uncritical. Throughout his career, he has warned against confusing tools with vision. Machines may record or transmit images, but they do not see; seeing remains an embodied, interpretive act. His persistent interest in multiple perspectives, immersive spaces and the movement of the eye suggests a resistance to any system that claims visual neutrality or objectivity. Technology, in his work, is valuable precisely because it can be bent, questioned and repurposed.
Seen across time, Hockney's technological experiments form a coherent throughline rather than a series of stylistic detours. Each new medium becomes a way of reopening old problems: how to represent space without flattening it, how to account for time within an image, how to make perception itself visible. The shift from Polaroid to pixel is not a leap forward so much as a lateral move, another attempt to escape the limits of inherited visual conventions.
Slowing Down the Image
In an age saturated with images, Hockney's practice feels unexpectedly instructive. His work suggests that technology does not determine how we see; it merely sets the conditions within which seeing takes place. What matters is the attention brought to those conditions, the willingness to question what feels natural or given. From the fractured grids of his Polaroid joiners to the glowing immediacy of his iPad drawings, Hockney reminds us that art's task is not to keep pace with technology, but to slow it down, holding its tools up to scrutiny and asking what they might yet reveal.
