On Presence, Three Artists and Their Practice (1938 to 2026)

This paper examines the practices of three women artists working across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation and Vilém Flusser’s analysis of technological mediation, it considers how their practices respond to changing conditions of production across analogue and digital technologies. The methodological approach is informed by autoethnography, using situated first-person experience to extend broader social and cultural critique. While one practice spans the transition between analogue and emerging digital modes, the other two operate within post-digital conditions in which material and technological processes are increasingly entangled. Across these contexts, the artists share recurring concerns with relation, ethics, embodiment, and a renewed emphasis on materiality and the tangible. Rather than treating technology as a determining force, the paper argues that changing technological conditions sharpen philosophical questions of presence, relation, and mediation. Through close attention to materials, processes of making, and artistic encounter, it proposes three interconnected ways of understanding presence as encounter, trace, and mediation. Together, these perspectives demonstrate how relationships become materially tangible through forms of embodiment, residual marks, and technologically mediated environments. In doing so, this paper positions presence as a relational and material site of meaning, showing how contemporary artistic practice can produce encounters that resist the reduction of the other.