DRAWING WITH THE PALM PILOT

2. Drawings can be reproduced on any scale and surface.

The size of the Palm Pilot screen is a limitation at the point of making the image; however, the computer makes it possible to reproduce the image on any scale or surface.

'I like the fact that no output or scale is more correct than any other. I wanted it to seem as if the drawings were sliding around the room - the whole room becomes a kind of drawing.' (SF)

3. Limited sensitivity of stylus and screen.

Palm Pilot drawings cannot be too detailed. This medium favours graphic line drawing rather than a complex rendering with shading, tone, colour and other devices of naturalistic depiction. While this may be a limitation in the sense that the subtleties of pressure, texture, weight and so on of a pencil line are not possible, it can also be an advantage. You are forced into using line in simple ways, and thus forced to condense and select. It may act in a similar way to physical restrictions which are often used in teaching to get students to loosen up and not control too closely what they are doing - for example to draw with a piece of charcoal on the end of a long stick.

Simon Faithfull exploits the linear quality of the palm pilot drawings for another purpose - to blur the distinction between different kinds of visual signs and thus to say something he believes about how we use visual 'maps' to understand our environment. In Faithfull's drawings, a city horizon line (image 3) may look much the same as the route lines on an map of the underground (image4). He deliberately sets out to overlap and confuse the reading of these very different kinds of visual signs, because he believes they fill a similar function.

image 3

image 4

'I think that the map of the tube and the horizon line have a similar place in our minds as signs to navigate by.' (SF)

In at least one drawing, the artist uses letters from a non-Latin alphabet. Because of their unfamiliarity (to a non-reader of that language) the letters function more as pattern and image rather than as word. (image 5)

image 5

4. Parts of a drawing are hidden from view when it is being made.

The drawing field on the Palm Pilot moves horizontally. It is possible to make a two inch by twelve inch drawing, say of a horizon line, by moving sideways on the screen; however, you can only see one screen-sized section of the image at once. This works against the drawing rule that tells you to always keep the whole image in your eye and mind. But as for other restrictions of the device, the artist sees this as a way of encouraging fresh ways of seeing, much the same as teachers sometimes might have students draw without looking at the paper.

www.smallmiracles.org.uk/leenavigation/drawing.html

5. Viewing and exchange.

Palm Pilot drawings can be passed electronically between computers. This means that there is no 'original', and the images perhaps acquire more the status of 'thoughts' than of 'things'. The emphasis is on free exchange of bits of visual information, (at least between people with access to computers) rather than the preciousness of a one-off work of art.