Standing at the shoreline, gazing out at the vast limitless expanse of ocean, what do we expect to see? Our future? Possible impending doom? The tides of cultural change? Clichés like visual caricature are a form of reduction, and in a visually saturated culture where the emphasis is continually on fidelity, resolution and realism, what place does the stylised simplistic and flattened pictorial representation have as an affecting experience? The western impulse to ‘make real’ the artificial has driven image technology away from the graphic, and towards mimesis. A long sheet of paper becomes a swirling vista as the animated tide-line laps at its edges, and then resumes its blank material properties as the water recedes.