There has to be a good reason for using a computer to paint with. So very much of computers' abililty is dedicated to reflecting the real world. But the real world just does it so much better. Take the Painter software I sometimes use. Its idea is to mimic traditional painting tools and materials. Amazing that you can drag through virtual oil paint which glistens appropriately. Amazing and tedious. Oil paint is just so much more subtle and smells right. The only justification I found for using this program is that it is possible to alter the definition of brushes to the point where they become physicaly impossible to build. This becomes interesting.

Because my work is executed in real-time, the character of tools, media and surfaces is a necessary aspect, even an essence, of the pieces. There just isn't time to touch things up or work over them so the work is the result of a frantic conversation between the tool (and its natural way of working) and my body (and its natural way of working. (Natural because of the need for efficiency as time is so short)). When the computer is able to provide new tools then new work can follow. In order to use the Painter software, I use a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet and stylus. The unfortunate effect of this, which took me a long time to overcome, was that, no matter which on-screen brush I created, the physical feeling was always the same (plastic gliding on plastic). As I make a 'mark' on the tablet, its digital analogue appears on the screen at almost the same time. Another problem was that my computer can't calculate quickly enough to keep up with all the movements my fingers are making so I have to have a fairly low resolution image (fewer calculations per second), leading to pixellation of the final image. This effect is therefore a necessary part of working in real-time with a computer and so, according to the above argument, is an essential part of the work.

A second technique involves a flatbed scanner, the lovely old piece of junk we use to scan documents into a computer. These really should have been superceded by now. Digital camera technology should have given us instant scanning. But at the moment we have these quaint machines with their whirring chains and delightfully slow speed. It's this which gives them a real-time aspect and so can be used in the kind of work I do. Take the lid off, and, instead of placing a piece of paper on the glass, move a tool over the glass relative to the moving light beam. Any time the tool is directly above the beam, it will be recorded; if it is ever in front of or behind the beam, there will be no record of its presence. The result is like moving a writing tool on a moving surface and the time spent by both is captured. We can think of the final image as a sequence of columns or rows of pixels. At each instant of the beam's journey across the glass, the computer records another column of pixels. Looking at any of the final images, you can imagine these columns lined up together to produce the work. Think of each column as a still in a movie. What we are seeing is an entire movie recorded as a still image. Perfect.

When I first got a Palm Vx PDA I was astonished to find that some bright spark has made a "painting" program for it. You could move the stylus over the 6cm square of glass and make tiny paintings, in a much less subtle way than with the Painter software I had been using. This led to a multitude of such paintings and then to the work called Analysis which is a thousand Palm paintings laid out in a zig-zag down the page, starting at the top right. Each time I made a successful painting, it was added, chronologically to the work. This snaking movement is called boustrophedon, meaning the way an ox ploughs a field. It was used by the ancient Greeks to write scrolls so that when you finished reading a line of writing, you didn't have to search for the beginning of the next line, you just starting reading backwards to the left (in fact, they also reversed the characters to reinforce this). I like the columns in this piece: they are like geological ice-cores. After six or seven hundred of these paintings, it was taking me longer and longer to come up with a decent one. Often I'd make forty or fifty to find one which was ok. Eventually things started to speed up again and I got the feeling I could make another thousand by the end.. There's a poster available, by the way.

There's programming as well. I wrote something called Particle Painter which tries to make digital paintings for itself while you have to impose your will on it (or interact gently with it) to alter the painting. It's available free and on-line on this site. Just follow the 'Particle' links.

Just got a camcorder so I'll be looking for ways to alter its normal nature in order to capture time more effectively. Obviously, any results will appear here soon. Finally, I have an idea for creating five-dimensional sculpture which I won't bore you with until I've done some experiments.