How is a Drawing like an MP3?

Music is interesting because you have to play it. If you want to hear it again, you have to play it again. A musical instrument sits there until somebody picks it up and uses it to make music.

You would think that drawing is totally different. After all, you can always see a drawing, you and look at it for as long as you want, you don't have to "repeat" it. You don't perform a work of art, you look at it. Unless you're a performance artist, but that's a different issue.

But, a drawing is actually a lot like an MP3. It is a recording of the movements that the artist made in a particular time and place.

You may not be able to see the order in which each line was drawn, but there in front of you is an exact copy of what the artist did. And it's there even hundreds, or thousands, of years later.

This is partly why cave paintings are so cool. They are not just objects, they are recordings, as if the person who made them is still standing there applying pigments to the wall.

So next time you look at a piece of art, think of the artist standing there, or sitting there, moving the brush or the pencil or the chalk around. That art is an exact recording of the time the artist spent there. Pretty cool.

Think about it the next time you look at a painting by Van Gogh. Wow, that guy moved the brush around a lot. With a lot of paint on there. Gives you a new perspective on his style and his personality and how intense he was.

And then, there is something in-between: the Phonautogram. This was how the very first recording of the human voice was made, by translating sound into squiggles on a piece of paper and then back into sound. Also pretty cool.

Art is not just a thing that we keep somewhere and look at, it's the actual movement of the artist.