Jonas Ivarsson, (right) Reader at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning at GothenburgUniversity  has used architecture students  to study how new tools affect the specific abilities students develop in school.

Within the research project Studying learning and representational technologies in design, supported by the Swedish Research Council, he  has observed and video documented  students’ progress, analysing their speech, gestures and tools, as well as the many objects they used.

"The results of their work are in many ways similar to those of previous generations, but the work process has changed significantly," says Ivarsson. "Modern computer technology makes it possible to test new design ideas with a very high level of visual realism.

"It has changed the entire design process and therefore the very nature of the architect’s work. Now there is more time for discussion and for additional cycles in the design process,’ he says.

According to the students’ teachers, the decrease in the time required to produce a drawing has had another effect as well. Students do not need to put the same effort into planning a drawing as they previously did. In the past, a lot of preparatory paper and pencil work was need for example choose the right perspective.
 

18 SCREENS, 9 CAMERAS: DAVID HOCKNEY's NEW MEDIUM

 
The Swedish findings  find a sybiotic echo in the amazing work of David Hockney, who explores a new artistic medium using high definition cameras, screens, software and moving images to capture the experience of seeing. 

 Martin Gayford author of A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney,  reported in his article, The Mind's Eye for Technology Review

"Watching 18 screens showing high-definition images captured by nine cameras. Each camera was set at a different angle, and many were set at different exposures.

In some cases, the images were filmed a few seconds apart, so the viewer is looking, simultaneously, at two different points in time.

The result is a moving collage, a sight that has never quite been seen before. But what the cameras are pointing at is so ordinary that most of us would drive past it with scarcely a glance."

"At the moment, the 18 screens are showing a slow progression along a country road. We are looking at grasses, wildflowers, and plants at very close quarters and from slightly varying points of view. The nine screens on the right show, at a time delay, the images just seen on the left. The effect is a little like a medieval tapestry, or Jan van Eyck's 15th-century painting of Paradise, but also somehow new. "A lot of people who were standing in the middle of the Garden of Eden wouldn't know they were there," Hockney says.


Hockney "drawing" with images from nine cameras. Credit David Hockney

The multiple moving images have some properties entirely different from those of a projected film.
A single screen directs your attention; you look where the camera was pointed. With multiple screens, you choose where to look. And the closer you move to each high-definition image, the more you see.

"Norman said this was a 21st-century version of ­Dürer's [Large] Piece of Turf," Hockney says. By 'Norman' he means Norman ­Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy in London and one of the doyens of the international contemporary-­art world. The comparison is an intriguing one. Albrecht Dürer's 1503 drawing (Das große Rasenstück in German) was a work of great originality.

Dürer used the media of the time—watercolor, pen, ink—to do something unprecedented: depict with great precision a little slice of wild, chaotic nature. He revealed what was always there but had never before been seen with such clarity.

Hockney believes that his multiscreen film collages are closer than conventional photography to the actual experience of human vision: "We're forcing you to look, because you have to scan, and in doing so you notice all the different textures in each screen. These films are making a critique of the one-camera view of the world. The point is that one camera can't show you that much."

You could say Hockney is using cameras to reveal the limitations of the camera. The films are the result of decades' thought about the place of old art forms—painting and drawing—in a world dominated by rapidly evolving photographic and electronic media.

Now 74, Hockney born in Bradford, is an exceptionally brilliant draftsman. belonging to one of the last generations of artists to receive a rigorous training in draftsmanship before art education changed in the late 1960s. He has also been adept at using new technology to find new ways to draw. In the 1980s he used early colour photocopiers and fax machines to make art.

Using the fax, he distributed art by phone; with the photocopier he made prints that, paradoxically, could not be photocopied (if you make an intense black by putting the paper through the machine four times, it cannot be replicated by a single copying process). 

During the last three years, he has been fascinated by the possibilities of drawing on, first, an iPhone and then—as soon as it appeared—an iPad. He had tried earlier forms of computer drawing but found them too slow for practical use. Now the iPad, plus an app called Brushes, is his medium of choice. He uses it as an electronic sketchbook; it is always by his side. A steady flow of iPhone and iPad drawings—loose, free, experimental, and intimate—pop, sometimes every day, into the mailboxes of his friends and acquaintances.

Recently he has begun printing Brushes drawings out at a large scale (this requires a program that prevents the images from pixelating, as they otherwise would). Early next year a sequence of these grand-scale iPad pictures will fill the largest gallery at the Royal Academy, where there is an exhibition of Hockney's new work depicting the very same Yorkshire landscapes that he films with his nine cameras and paints in oil. His work in all three media is interdependent. The paintings and drawings led on to the films, and the films in turn prompt new directions for the paintings and drawings.

Untitled, 30 November 2010, No. 1, created on an iPad. Credit: ©David Hockney