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Conference papers Paul Gough Paper given at : CONFLICT, MEMORY, AND MATERIAL CULTURE: THE GREAT WAR, 1914-2004 The Second University College London/Imperial War Museum Conference on Materialities and Cultural Memory of 20th-Century Conflict. Saturday 11th September, 2004, at the Imperial War Museum, London ‘Calculating the future’ – panoramic sketching, reconnaissance drawing and the material trace of war Since the establishment of the training academies in the 18th century, the military have taught drawing as a navigational and exploratory tool. At Woolwich, Dartmouth and Marlowe, gentlemen cadets and sailors were trained to analyse and record landscape and coastline as a means of neutralising and controlling enemy space. The practice is maintained today; the quality of drawing is still schematic and the process of looking and noting is reduced to basic methods of measuring and calibration. This paper explores the tenets of scopic control and the creation of a unique material trace of warfare. By focusing on the period 1915 to 1918 the paper will examine how military sketching required avant-garde British painters to adopt the systematic coding of surveillance with varying results. Whereas many ‘professional’ artists struggled with the strict regimen of panoramic sketching, a large number of soldier-artists rapidly learned to adopt its simplistic visual codes. They were able to produce material that had both a spatial and a temporal dimension, and their work embraced both the measurement of the spatially unknown, but also the distant view of an unknowable ‘future’. back