DRAWING WITH THE PALM PILOT

Most of what is peculiar to the palm pilot as a drawing medium derives from its mixture of hand and digital technology.

The palm pilot has a four inch square screen on which one draws with a stylus shaped like a small, slim pencil. The size of a mobile phone, it is as easy to carry around and use as a traditional sketchbook. You can vary the thickness and quality of the line by choosing from a menu of line types. Drawings, or parts of them, can be electronically 'rubbed out'. After one drawing is finished it is saved and a blank screen is secured for the next drawing. A huge number of drawings can be stored in the palm pilot, and any of them can be called back onto the screen, changed or deleted. When the palm pilot is hooked up to a computer, the drawings are downloaded and stored as files. In this form drawings can be made bigger or smaller, modified, printed or sent to others by email.

Every medium has advantages and limitations. Artists using a given medium will make use of its inherent properties in different ways. The following qualities of the palm pilot as a drawing medium can be seen as advantages and limitations at the same time.

1. Sketching and pixellation

A line drawn on the Palm Pilot screen is not made of deposits of pencil lead or charcoal, but of 'pixels' - the units by which a computer builds a visual image. A digital image is in the form of packets of yes-no information which tell the computer to create a black rectangle 'here' but 'not here'. Thus a digital sketch is made up of black blocks - pixels - against a white background (image1) Copies of digital images are identical (except in scale). Enlarging a digital image reveals no more information. What enlarging does is make the 'building block', pixelated, quality of the drawing more apparent.

Building block

The Palm Pilot uses traditional hand drawing to create the initial image. One is free to use the screen like a sheet of paper and the stylus like a pen or pencil, and to sketch without thinking or knowing about the inner workings of the machine. What appears on the screen looks like any irregular, sketched line. But because the line is being recorded as digital information, when it is enlarged, the sketch reveals its pixels and thus has a very different look to a drawing made by pencil, pen or charcoal.

gun

One of the effects is that irregularities and awkwardnesses in drawing are 'smoothed out' by the building block appearance of the pixels, and thus made to look deliberate and somehow polished or 'official'. A pixellated drawing looks a bit like a logo. Simon Faithfull strengthens the gap between rough sketch and pixellated outcome by preferring to leave the images as he first laid them down. That is, he prefers not to tinker with or modify the drawings later when they are downloaded into the computer, except in scale.

'I like the contradiction between the forced casualness of drawing on the palm pilot and the controlled grid the computer puts it into.' (SF)

'I want to remove the mystique of authenticity, the artist's hand, etc. through using the computer, but it's a paradox because the artist's hand is still very much there.' (SF)

'The drawings are semi-performative because they're not modified afterwards. As soon as the pixels are laid down, I leave it 'raw', much as you'd leave a sketch in a sketchbook.' (SF)