Surface & Signal Press, an independent arts-research communications imprint operated by Jeekwai Art Co Ltd, has announced the publication of a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of EVA London 2026. The paper, titled "Fixing Chicago Neighbourhood and New Nature: Simulation with Paper and Digital Printing," examines how photography, digital processing, and paper printing can transform images into physical surfaces, offering insights into the intersection of digital and material worlds.
The open-access paper, available at https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/EVA2026.15, was authored by Jiaqi Li, Wenru Xu, and Elke Reinhuber. It focuses on two artworks by Li: New Nature (2019) and Fixing Chicago Neighbourhood (2020). In New Nature, photographs of organic materials such as banana peel, chicken skin, plants, and caterpillars were processed into repeating digital textures and printed on paper. These prints became more than fifty hollow sculptural forms, setting the visual appearance of organic matter against a lightweight, constructed interior. This work draws attention to the separation between surface and structure, a theme central to the paper's analysis.
Fixing Chicago Neighbourhood began with photographs of damaged surfaces in Chicago, including cracks in roads, walls, paving, and transit stations. The damaged areas were digitally reconstructed and printed at approximately their original scale. The resulting paper images were placed over the damaged sites as temporary interventions. They did not repair the underlying material but made visible the difference between an appearance of repair and actual material repair. This approach highlights the potential of digital printing to simulate repair without altering the physical environment, raising questions about the role of temporary interventions in urban spaces.
The authors position these projects between simulation, trompe l'oeil, and optical illusion. Rather than seeking flawless deception, the works retain visible seams, repeated textures, paper edges, and other material inconsistencies. These features allow viewers to recognize the construction of the image while it occupies physical space. The paper proposes the term "expanded trompe l'oeil" for contemporary practices that extend beyond illusionistic painting to include photography, digital printing, sculpture, installation, screens, projections, public interventions, and video-game aesthetics. It argues that the imperfect return of a digital image to material form can reveal a productive gap between virtual representation and physical objects.
For leaders in business and technology, this research underscores the growing importance of digital printing as a tool for simulation and intervention. The ability to create physical surfaces from digital images—complete with deliberate imperfections—opens new possibilities for prototyping, urban design, and temporary installations. The paper's focus on the gap between representation and reality also has implications for fields such as augmented reality and digital twins, where the boundary between virtual and physical is increasingly blurred.
The paper appears on pages 83-88 of the open-access Proceedings of EVA London 2026, published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. EVA London, or Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, is an interdisciplinary conference on art, visualization, and digital technologies. The 2026 conference took place in London and online from July 13 to 17. Surface & Signal Press, which operates under Jeekwai Art Co Ltd, focuses on publishing factual, accessible communications about contemporary art, visual culture, digital media, and research-led creative practice, with an emphasis on how images, materials, and technical systems shape public and everyday environments.
