"WHEN The New Yorker magazine put out its first June issue this year, the cover art made headlines. It was a dreamy, late-night scene of a hotdog stand in New York by artist Jorge Colombo created using, of all things, an iPhone app. Traditionally, computers and artists have made uneasy bedfellows, so why did this image succeed? The iPhone's touch screen is the key, says Cathy Treadaway of the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, in the UK, as it taps into artists' desire to use their hands to express themselves. "One of the things artists try and do when they make an artwork is communicate a bit of themselves, their emotional content, if you like," says Treadaway. And hands are a formidable outlet for this. "Our hands are a channel into the body and out into the world. That's the way we are built, the way we are wired." Treadaway's own work has shown that traditional computer software and interfaces, such as the mouse and keyboard, hinder artists, as they demand attention to details such as menu items, and involve making micro-movements with the mouse. "Your thought processes are working in a very different way than if you were crafting by hand," says Treadaway, who presented her analysis last week at the Creativity and Cognition 2009 conference at the University of California, Berkeley. Having to focus on computer commands can severely disrupt artists' thought patterns, agrees Ann Marie Shillito at the Edinburgh College of Art in the UK. "It's a real constraint on creativity," she says. "That's why a lot of artists and applied artists [such as jewellery and furniture makers] shun working on a computer." But as The New Yorker's cover shows, things are changing. The iPhone Brushes app is part of a new breed of technology that allows artists to use software that permits more natural movements to create artwork." - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

"Keefe has been working on a project called Drawing on Air, in which the artist works in a 3D virtual environment, holding a haptic device, called the Phantom, in one hand and wearing a glove connected to a computer in the other (see photo). The image is created using the "tape drawing" technique, commonly used in car design, in which both hands are used to draw lines. One hand indicates the start point of a line, while the other moves to where you want the line to go. The haptic device provides feedback on the hardness of a surface, enabling the artist to feel the same resistance they would if painting on paper, for example." - RAPatton