Creation is Analog

Rick writes...

Has everything gone digital?

We check time on digital watches, talk on digital phones, take pictures with digital cameras, listen to digital music, find our way with digital maps, read digital books, spend digital cash, weigh ourselves with digital scales, and welcome guests when a digital doorbell rings.

But when we create art on a Zentangle tile, it’s all analog. And there’s a reason for that.

First, some descriptions:

Our analog world is characterized by continuous and smooth transitions. There are no abrupt steps between any one point and another. A good example is the old familiar analog bathroom scale with its revolving disk showing the weight.

Digital, in contrast, refers to a discrete and symbolic representation of some part of our analog world. It takes a continuous signal and samples it. If your digital scale only displays pounds, it rounds to the nearest whole number, losing the infinite gradations in between. A digital image is composed of a finite set of pixels where each pixel represents the average color of a sampled area. No matter how high the resolution, you always lose something.

You can see this digital effect in an enlargement of Maria’s latest creation, “Autumn Draws Near.”

In the Zentangle Method, we keep it analog. We use physical pens and pencils on physical paper. Perhaps this is one reason for the profound benefits people experience. As we interact more with digital “re-presentations” of our world, creating physical analog art returns us - if only for a few moments - to the real, the physical, the continuous.

With a computer drawing program, your eyes are on a screen while your hand moves a stylus on a separate pad. The drawing program converts the movement and pressure into 1’s and 0’s, and displays a representation on the screen.

When drawing on a physical tile, no interface mediates how and what you create. Your eyes focus on your pen tip as it touches the paper. As you create your infinitely smooth strokes, you are “drawn” into the beauty and intimacy of the moment. There is nothing between you and your art. You feel the drag of your pen on your paper. Your fingers get real ink and graphite on them.

This experience of creating Zentangle art (or anything analog) hints at something profound - that there is much more to creation than we can see, measure, weigh, or digitize.

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Digitization requires breaking things down into discrete natural numbers—ultimately, the 1s and 0s of binary code. But the design template of our analog creation resonates, not with natural numbers like 0, 1, 2, and 3, but with irrational numbers like Pi or the golden ratio Phi. Mathematicians call these continuous infinite ratios “irrational,” not because they are illogical, but because they cannot be expressed as a simple ratio of two whole numbers. Their decimals go on forever without repeating. In other words, they can never be fully digitized.

When the ancient Greeks of the Pythagorean school are said to have discovered so-called “irrational” numbers, it was deeply unsettling. It disrupted their belief that creation could be explained entirely by tidy ratios. These numbers revealed a reality greater than their rational models anticipated.

I like to call them supernatural numbers for they remind us that there is more to creation than can be seen, measured, weighed, or digitized. To paraphrase Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, “The Way that can be digitized is not the eternal Way.”

With digital’s 1s and 0s, we can brilliantly model some aspects of the analog. We continue to develop more innovative models through logic and mathematics. Digitization powers incredible tools and connections that we all use and benefit from every day.

And yet, the critical components of the creative process can never be digitized, because they can’t be seen and they can’t be anticipated. The heat of the creative spark that inspires your next pen stroke cannot be contained by 1s and 0s.

Creating Zentangle art with physical tools on physical surfaces offers an immediate and rejuvenating return to our analog world. This simple practice of putting ink on paper in beautiful patterns echoes a larger world of synchronicities and knowings, connections and communities... all of which we experience through our analog hearts. 

Join us for Project Pack No. 28, starting December 5th, as we collectively tangle and return to our analog world for 12 days straight.

Buy your supplies in the Zentangle Store!