DIGITAL TO DIGITAL

Last week, I mentioned how we are on an unstoppable arc toward digitization. Our sacred act of analogue drawing is being skewed toward digitization.

Yet there are technologies which help integrate our analogue drawings into the digital cloud. It is called a scanner. Most of us have some sort of desktop scanner.   There are scan apps available for our phones. Some of the app titles are Scanner Pro, Scanbot, InstaPDF, etc. I have a huge predilection towards free apps.

While there is a high chance that you know about these apps already, the point is that with scanners and apps, our analogue drawings are thoroughly integrated into the digital mix. No, it is not as nifty as the Moleskine system in which the lines that you draw in your sketchbook magically show up on the screen of your tablet.

But with all of these digital interfaces available to us, I really do not see any sort of loss or inefficiency by continuing to make analogue drawings.

A typical generative cycle for a transparent drawing goes something like this. You get an idea on something that you want to analyze. Let’s say it is Aalto’s Baker House. So you might be fortunate to travel there and then walk around and in the building, taking photos with your phone. If not, there are as we know plans, sections, site plans, photos, etc. on the web. So from either the photos that we take or web images, we are relying on our digital device for input. As we look at the images on our digital device, we are mentally constructing the Baker House enclosure. Then we make marks on our paper so as to internalize our understanding of this enclosure. Then we scan our drawing. And it completes the digital cycle. Some form of digital input. Analogue operations. And then back to the digital.

Let’s call this a Digital To Digital drawing cycle.

While all of this might seem obvious, it is easy to forget. It is easy to forget that somehow because we are not making manipulations directly within a digital system, that we are somehow not operating optimally. It is easy to have the uneasy feeling that we are somehow missing something by not making marks with direct digital input.

Are the digital results exactly the same? No. And that’s good. Why? For starters, you still get the enormous sensory input of drawing with a pencil on a nice piece of paper. Just that feeling is worth a whole lot. And I could go on about the feeling of putting down that first transparent tone of watercolor on the paper and how good that feels.  But you know all of that.

So is seems to me that Digital To Digital is the best of both worlds. We start with the best and most convenient aspects of our digital devices; compact, incredibly clear screen images, etc. We then maintain our humanity by operating analogue. And we end up with an electronic version of our drawing.

“Ashes to ashes, funk to funky…”