notes from underground

It’s not anywhere close to digital painting in terms of the problems it presents, but a quote from this week’s New Yorker (4/9/07) brings up yet another problem with the computer vis-a-vis the creative process:

On the P.C., we use the same skills that we used on the typewriter, but the contact is not the same. We run our fingers lightly over the keys, making a gentle, pitter-patter sound. On the typewriter, by contrast, we had to stab, and the machine recorded our action with a great big clack. We liked that… The noise told us that we had accomplished something.

. . .

Which brings us to the white page. Mallarmé spoke of the uncertainty with which we face a clean sheet of paper and try, in vain, to record our thoughts on it with some precision. As long as we were feeding paper into the typewriter, this anxiety was still present to our mings, and was revealed in the pointillism of Wite-Out, or even in the dapple of letters that were darker, pressed in conficende, as opposed to the lighter ones, pressed more hesitantly. A page produced on a manual typewriter was like a record of the torture of thought.

The article goes on to note that the “effortlessly and undetectably erasable” text we produce on computers “buries the evidence of our struggle, asserting that what we said was what we thought all along.” Regardless of whether typewriters spoke to the previous generation of authors in the way the Muses spoke to Virgil, something has been lost in the departure from the tactile. This echoes my own feelings about digital painting, and how frustrating it is to work for hours on something that looks so clean and digital that surely it was done faster than that? At Siggraph I got to try a force-feedback 3D modeling tool, that let you mould CG meshes as you would with clay, to extraordinary results. Wacom tablets have adjustable heads to control the feeling of the pen against the screen. We’re moving in the right direction, but that heavy clacking sound, and its artistic analogue of the friction between loaded brush and rough canvas, are still beyond our grasp on the computer. Maybe that’s how it should be; maybe the two worlds are best kept separated. I’d hope not, though.