BRUSH.jpeg Manuscript

BRUSH.jpeg is a coded drawing interface built in p5.js, an open-source JavaScript library for creating generative and interactive works within a web browser. Replacing conventional brushes with assets from the World Wide Web—uploaded photos, webcam captures, or API-generated images—digital artifacts become the painterly materials of the artist. Smeared strokes of images dragged across the screen construct fragmented compositions of drawing, collage, and software art. I made the compositions featured here—pomegranate, pattern of yonis, and pond—using this program.

BRUSH.jpeg illustrates how organic systems and their technological derivatives gradually transform through repetition, reiteration, and accumulation. Across the series, imagery of the feminine spirit, fruiting textures, and abstracted reproductive organs evoke a softly evolving digital reality. Fluid forms are as bare as the code that generates them. Recurring representations of the yoni, the eternal womb, embody BRUSH.jpeg’s interface as a medium for creation, interweaving bodily symbolism with digital processes.

At its core, BRUSH.jpeg critiques the homogenizing quest of digital platforms towards optimization. While these spaces grow more automated, prioritizing frictionless design and concealing the labour that builds them, BRUSH.jpeg instead positions itself as a conceptual framework that resists and exposes its digital making. Convenience is sacrificed for what is regained in tension. Drawings are created using a mouse, with no undo available, through a system that amplifies lag, pixelation, and compression. Rather than correcting the glitches that emerge, BRUSH.jpeg treats them as evidence of presence and persistence, reclaiming the gestural hand within a computational system.

This reclamation becomes especially relevant against the proliferation of AI-generated content and its erasure of artistic labour and authorship. In direct response, the project presents a form of digital art rooted in transparency. Where generative AI conceals its references in imitation, BRUSH.jpeg exposes the mechanics of sampling outright. Images are not erased into invisible datasets, but remain intact as textural digital residue. As forms emerge from glitched layers of generated source material, the resulting compositions exist in tension between preservation and modification.

To learn more about BRUSH.jpeg, visit the project here. The drawing interface is publicly available, as well as its underlying script for further modification and mutation. All images from this project were sourced from Unsplash, an online repository of images uploaded directly by their artists for free use. When randomly generating images from the Unsplash API, BRUSH.jpeg concurrently builds a credit list that links back to the artist’s profile.

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This project is supported by EQ Bank as part of an ongoing partnership that highlights Canadian digital art practices, featuring commissioned works showcased in print and through expanded digital formats.

Kahani is a dimension-bending tech artist whose artworks invent new, immersive experiences within hybrid spaces. Guided by her Indian heritage, Kahani draws parallels between the cosmic philosophy of Hinduism and the glitch in exploring notions of digital spiritualism, and embodiment. Her work considers the glitch as a purposeful gesture that can push our digital experiences away from their current structures and functions into experimental and transformative models for being. 

Kahani is the 2025 recipient of EQ Bank’s Emerging Digital Artist Award in the 3D Installation category for her work Virtual Shiva. She has participated in several group exhibitions, and workshops across Canada, covering topics of embodied extended reality, video game installations, digital archiving, and creative coding. 

This article is published in issue 43.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue