Draw & Save

Leaving a mark is the quintessential, atavistic experience of drawing. Marks drawn in the sand by the hand, the fingers or a stick; a mark carved on a tree with a pocket knife. The instruments in the act of drawing start with the blackboard and the chalk and then lead to the paper and the pencil, then the pen, and finally ends with complex and technologically sophisticated interactive surfaces. The I and the MARK it leaves is gradually separated by new forms of increasingly complicated media, burdening the everyday experience of drawing.

Nowadays more people have mobile phones in their pockets than paper and pencil. Today’s man has been distanced from the natural instruments (of drawing) but – it seems – that it is technology that brings him back to the everyday experience of scribbling: the finger drawing programmes installed on state-of-the-art mobile phones create anew the atavistic experience of leaving a mark. Perhaps it all comes full circle here. Perhaps, besides the write&read culture of blogging a new tradition is in the making: that of draw&save.