It’s not Digital Art, it’s Mobile Art
Is mobile art the next generation of digital art?
When people say I make digital art, it doesn’t sound quite right. Technically speaking, yes, I often compose works using a digital device, but it sounds very ‘last generation’ — almost retro — to my ears. When I think of ‘digital art,’ I envision pixels, a mouse and a desktop computer, whereas mobile art — what I produce — uses touch, a multitude of ever-changing apps, and a smartphone or tablet.
The tools and the software are different and, therefore, so is the art. In 2018 touch can easily produce organic shapes that vary according to an improvised gesture of my hand and varying pressure applied to the screen, whereas it’s quite cumbersome to produce with the same spontaneity using a mouse and a desktop computer. Even if you use a Wacom tablet, the mark appears on the screen in front of you while your hand moves across your desk, unlike touch which simulates direct physical mark making.
In other words, digital art requires a certain amount of programming and setup, in keeping with its somewhat rigid sounding name, whereas mobile art has an immediacy that is similar to traditional painting and drawing practices.
The distribution of mobile art is different, as well. Today, the most popular means of distributing images is on Instagram, and perhaps Snapchat, both ‘mobile only’-based applications. One could theoretically add Facebook and Twitter to the list but these both have their issues: Facebook heavily compresses images, deteriorating their quality significantly enough to remove the platform as a viable option, while Twitter is more word and link-based than image-based, and generally lacks the appropriate audience, although it has potential. And though images can be uploaded to these two platforms on desktop, they are still nevertheless mobile-first apps in terms of their product designs.
All to say, the production of art on mobile devices has a strong bias towards mobile-first, if not mobile-only, distribution platforms. Conversely, if you produce a digital image using Photoshop, you’ll probably end up emailing it to your phone to share it with the world.
This isn’t to say digital art is either bad or worse than mobile art, but rather to point out that these distinct methods of producing and distributing images have very different natures, and it’s time we highlighted the distinction between the two.
