Stuart Mealing

On drawing a circle

Emotions generated in the viewer by objective drawings which are made using traditional media are different from those elicited by digitally originated marks presented on a computer screen. This chapter explores the dichotomy of production and interpretation of the two forms of mark-making and considers the possibility that they may lead to different understandings of the world.

Prologue

The story is told by Vasari of Pope Benedict IX sending a messenger to a number of artists with a view to commissioning one of them. In Florence he met with Giotto and requested of him a drawing to take to His Holiness. The painter took a brush, "then, resting his elbow on his side, with one turn of his hand he drew a circle so perfect and exact that it was a marvel to behold." The courtier thought he could not be serious to offer so little but took the drawing to the Pope who "instantly perceived that Giotto surpassed all other painters of his time."

The implicit equation of a circle (centred on j) is: (x-xj)2+ (y-yj)2- r2= 0.

On drawing a circle

How do you, I or Giotto draw a circle? How its circularity stored in the mind – by its appearance, by its formula, by the algorithm used to construct it? A circle could be thought of either statically or dynamically, as a concatenation of all positions in one plane which are the same distance from a single point or as an arc sweeping before your eyes. In the first incarnation it is matched by a mathematical template, in the second by a turn of the wrist.

When fingers and wrist combine to take a line on a slow, looping journey there is constant feedback from eye to hand, correcting incrementally against a mental model. On a rapid circumscription it seems to be habit, burnt into the nerves and muscles, that drives the action. Of course in the context of objective drawing the mark not only has its own identity but also stands for something in the outside world. The significance is that a circle is more than its shape, it embodies a concept. It hints of containment, harbours dreams of perfection, reminds of heads, suns and apples. This reference to the world outside the drawing, whether tacit or explicit, ties the experience of the observer to that of the mark's creator and the mark may need to carry evidence of humanity to establish the link convincingly.

Making marks, externalising and looking are vital parts of an artist's process. They are clearly linked to one another but also create a conduit through which ideas flow back and forth between artist, subject and image. It is through the process of making and refining marks to stand for the subject that the artist comes to a better understanding of the subject – its form, its weight, its articulation, its occupation of space, its place in the world, its circularity.

Poles apart

As I have commented in the introduction to this book, there is an undeniable frisson about juxtaposing the words 'art' and 'computer' since they stand at the gateways of seemingly opposite worlds, guardians of opposite values and standards. Their juxtaposition calls into dispute embedded notions about art, about creativity, about consciousness and thus about the human condition. Their union provokes questions about new aesthetics, new directions and new destinations.

Within the domain of art the immediacy and directness of objective drawing arguably renders it the subset of the discipline which has the narrowest gap between encounter and corresponding mark; the medium where artist, subject and image are closest. As such a knowing distinction between the stamp of man or machine could play an overbearing role in emotional response to an image. Negroponte comments that 'computers and art can bring out the worst in each other when they first meet. One reason is that the signature of the machine can be too strong.' Neither is idiosyncrasy normally an intended feature of machines.

Local context can also be an issue, both in production and viewing, which separates traditional media from digital. The archetypal life drawing studio, stained by generations of use and redolent both of its own history and that of its subject, provides a very different working environment from that surrounding the average computer workstation. Similarly, viewing an image on the wall of an art gallery provides a very different physical and cultural experience to that of staring at a computer screen, even when the computer itself is displayed in a gallery.

Dislocations

Traditional coordinations are revised when drawing with a computer. Whilst the hand typically toils in a horizontal plane, the results of its efforts are output to a normally vertical screen and with a delay lasting from imperceptible to worrying according to the type of mark being made and the speed of the system.

The tools available in a computer paint system largely imitate those available for traditional mark-making. The value of this imitation is the apparent familiarity the user has with the new tools – there seems little to learn. The problem with this imitation is the apparent familiarity the user has with the new tools – the fundamental differences are overlooked. The computer provides a new set of relationships for the artist between tool and mark, relationships which modify, distort or destroy much of the feedback which drives traditional drawing.

The drawing tool is usually replaced in the current digital world with a universal proxy that stands for all available tools. Its feel does not change whether simulating the grate of a charcoal stick or the smooth slide of a sable brush nor whether it is making light, fine scratches or broad, wet sweeps. If it comes in the awkward form of a mouse the required grip is more like that on a bar of soap though a stylus is pencil-like and permits fingertip control reminiscent of 'real' media. Tool pressure can be set to modify variables such as size and opacity of marks but such relationships are pre-set rather than modified whilst in use. There is, however, none of the tactile feedback, none of the physicality of pen, chalk and paper. 'We draw a picture without making a mark, wield brushes that have no bristles, mix paints that do not pour'.

A new breed of haptic devices is slowly emerging which offers sensory feedback from the virtual texture of a surface and force-feedback from the virtual forces an object might embody but these are currently uncommon. Their functionality tends also to be limited and application specific.

The scale of marks is physically limited by the size of the graphics tablet (or mouse mat) available and may be psychologically inhibited by the cramped space often allocated to computer workstations. There is also the potential for the mapping of hand movement to screen mark being other than 1:1; a small hand movement can be scaled up to produce a larger mark for example, or the screen image may be enlarged so that the opposite is true. More disconcerting is that the relationship between tool and screen coordinates can be either absolute or relative, the former matching the real world but a mouse typically abandoning an absolute relationship when it is out of contact with a surface. This means that if a mouse is raised from its mat and replaced at any new position the screen position of its cursor remains unchanged.

Digital mimicry

The term 'computer paint system' usually refers to a system using a pixel-based representation of marks in which all the information in an image is stored point by discrete point, row by discrete row. In such a system a straight line exists only as a number of contiguous pixel locations. The term 'computer drawing system' usually refers to a vector based system in which information is stored in terms of relative positions expressed mathematically. In this system a straight line is known by the coordinates of its endpoints. Systems increasingly combine these forms of representation but I use the two terms hereafter in their exclusive senses. The appearance of lines drawn with the two systems may appear similar on screen but they have very different identities which will be explored later.

The digital marks I describe are screen based (I resist the argument that they reside in the frame buffer –a specialised piece of computer memory reserved for image storage – and do not deal here with translations of the image that are output to devices such as printers) but the screen holds a canvas of marks made with light and not substance. This leads to a very different gamut from traditional media; the range, contrast and calibre of possible screen colours being poorly matched by paper and ink, whilst traditional media has a range of textures and qualities that pixels on a screen cannot match. And as Wrightputs it, an electronic image has a 'reproduced' quality to it – it seems to float behind the glass of the screen, seems to be unlocated at any unique point in space. .. Electronic images are limited by the screen but are not on the screen. There is some parallel here with the loss of substance in a traditional drawing locked behind glass. Petherbridgehas noted her regret that an exhibition cannot convey the pleasures that come from handling a drawing. That intimacy, that conversation with the work, cannot be replicated by drawings distanced behind glass and hung vertically on walls.

On a VDU screen the surface doesn't get dirty, the simulated water-colour does not soak in, the simulated lead does not tear the surface, there is no serendipitous smudging, the mark never becomes a physical part of the drawing and the tool itself is never eroded. In some way the image has become more cerebral because of this lack of physical integration with the surface. And while the hand moves in an analogue world the parameters of the digital mark it gives birth to – its position, width, colour, transparency – all change in pixel sized increments. Even attempts at a fine, clean mark are subverted by the demands of antialiasing (a counter-intuitive process by which the edges of a screen shape are blended into the background in order to give the appearance of a cleaner edge). Without antialiasing shapes have saw-toothed edges (unless resolutely vertical or horizontal) but by its very nature the process prohibits detail and will do so until improved display resolution renders its intervention unnecessary.

The struggle when using traditional media, making the material deny its own nature and become servant to an image, often drives the art process. It can provide much of the final image's excitement and is also a hook for the viewer's empathy. An image on a computer screen does not recount the same fight although a digital alternative may have taken place. Making demands of stubborn software can be equally tiring and a successful outcome can be equally satisfying but the activity is more intellectual and less physical.

Drawing has traditionally been about hand skills with each drawing tool a fresh extension of the hand, its immediacy intuitively appropriate to investigation of the human condition. But can we, in cyberspace, recognise 'the primal nature of drawing, its universality and economy of means, its expressive intensity, its ability to reveal process and autograph'; even the word 'drawing' has been appropriated by the world of computing to refer to mathematically defined marks which inhabit the same plane but retain discrete identities. The various discontinuities of physical and intellectual expectation in the digital process combine to incite a detachment between subject and image. There is an intuitive sense that the meaning a mark carries is not just a product of the viewer's ability to interpret it through experience, but a legacy of its creator's experience.

Passing time

The mark-making process in traditional drawing is both additive and subtractive. Marks are made, assessed and then either added to or removed (or the drawing is finished) yet the drawing as a whole is added to by both marks and erasures. The act of rubbing out a mark adds a positive intellectual statement to the drawing as well as adding a local change of texture to its surface. It breaks up the surface like a drawing tool and smudges marks that skirt its passage. It is also likely to leave behind some faint reminder of the mark erased and the developing drawing therefore reveals both its history and its current state. The drawing declares itself to have developed over time, to have had a life. An erasure becomes another type of mark.

On the other hand, in a typical computer paint system, erasure is usually absolute (though the Painter' software is a notable exception in which 'water-colour', for example, 'stains' the surface and is not erasable, whereas 'charcoal' etc. can be erased). The image 'surface' is returned to its virgin state with no trace of its recent history remaining. In this sense a computer generated image could be said to have no past, no provenance. If the system includes an 'undo' button then the drawing's past can be peeled back in discrete stages and the image returned to any previous state without record of time having past. It has effectively become a brain-washing button.

Two alternative strategies which allow a return to previous states are those of saving the image at regular stages (in which case a number of separate versions of an image coexist) and the use of layers (in which different elements of the image are stored discretely and superimposed on top of one another). The marks in a layered system, either individually or grouped in collections, are no longer welded together – stable and indivisible – they cooperate but are not bound to one another. Although both strategies offer an often welcome flexibility they both mitigate against commitment to a mark, one hallmark of its integrity.

The noble mark

At the time of the Renaissance one of the interpretations of the word drawing (disegno) was that of 'the creative idea made visible in the preliminary sketch', a concept which embodies more than just the effectiveness of representation.

Drawing is also widely understood to provide a rich way of exploring and coming to understand the world about us with marks on a surface describing not only visual experience but attitudes to them. Perhaps notions such as these load hand-drawn marks with a spirituality and reverence that digital electronics lacks the gravitas to support.

The devotional aspects of viewing traditional drawing, of communing with the muses, seem to require evidence of a human hand which is disguised when in digital form. The affectionate hand has been equally present in screen-based marks but their lack of physical evidence is not easy to overlook. For generations introduced to drawing through digital means this may present little barrier and the computer's alternative strengths may outweigh any that are perceived. There are clearly cultural and generational perspectives on screen media which the prevalence of television and computer games has engendered.

New tools for old

Digital technology transforms the language of drawing. Although the physicality of 'real' media is removed in a computer paint system it clearly has its roots in traditional media. In a computer drawing system, however, a whole new grammar and syntax is born; the marks it gives rise to have a wholly different relationship to visual reality. The two systems are conceptually mapped to different worlds.

A straight line exists in a vector drawing as a rigid connection between end points, a mark-object which can be moved independent of the surface on which it sits. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the surface above which it floats; so unlike our own dear mortal mark. A vector drawing is a Meccano kit of customised parts which can be manipulated individually or bolted together in groups, all of which can be aligned automatically using a predefined screen grid. It lacks the benefits of ambiguity but asserts absolute confidence to the world.