Gut feeling

Queasy: From a series of images searching for how a gut feeling could be visualised

We know the term 'gut feeling' so well that perhaps we ignore it. Our feelings lie inside us and often lodge themselves into or emanate from our stomach. A stomach that is filled with bacteria, another life form that has evolved in conjunction with ourselves and that is so entwined with our bodily processes that it could be thought of as both another brain and another body, our ghost or double, that is thinking for us or alongside us, as we predict what to do next in the world.

Writers are very aware of this and we often find passages in novels that suggest that our bodies contain the source of our intuitive feelings. For instance this from Vajra Chandrasekera's myth creating novel, 'The Saint of Bright Doors':

'He feels that familiar sensation in his gut: the sickening, queasy tugging that he has always thought of as his luck, his instinct, some deep sensitivity to the world that senses where he needs to go, what he needs to do, long before he can even articulate it. When it bubbles up in him, there is always something he needs to do, even if he doesn't know it yet.' (2023, p. 26)

In an earlier post, when writing about Turner and his relationship to weather I wrote, "I believe that at the core of art's image making process is the idea that the universe is made of physical stuff and that as Seth (2021, p.20) states, 'conscious states are either identical to or somehow emerge from, particular arrangements of this physical stuff'. Artists can therefore work with material processes to create metaphors by making their own arrangements of physical stuff (paint, drawing materials, clay, stone, found objects etc.). These arrangements or physical conglomerations are like in someway, those other particular arrangements of physical stuff that are not art, those organisations of materials that we call life experience. By making these arrangements, (art) we help ourselves come to terms with the chaos of the arrangements of materials we experience as 'life'.

So yes physical stuff moved around in similar ways to other physical stuff. Echoes of larger forces perhaps? Our microbiome is spread throughout our body, and concentrated differently in the various areas that bacteria and other organisms, such as fungi, collect. It is also important to remember that microorganisms form the bedrock on which every ecosystem on Earth is founded. Without them we would have no air to breath or food to eat; without them we would not even be able to digest food, even if it became available. At a basic level, they are linked to the atoms and molecules that make up the non-animate physical world, sitting between them and 'life', holding myriads of conversations between animate and non-animate worlds through chemical and electrical exchanges. Everything is connected and the trillions of entities that live within us, connect us together, and link us to the rest of the world, just as surely as gravity holds together the mass of substances that we call the Earth, and in its own small way, how the various blobs and marks that make up or compose a drawing, come together.

So can I fuse these various bits of awareness with the visual metaphors I use in the images I make? Towards what purpose? If we can begin to see our bodies as feeling tones, as thinking entities that operate as material texts, then perhaps we can begin to see how inextricably linked we are into the Earth's bio-systems and as one steps back and looks at the situation from a cosmic distance, how we are linked in to the universe itself. Portraits of humans could be more like star systems or molecular level clusters seen via electron microscopes, all linked by interwoven energies be they electromagnetic, nuclear or gravitational.  

Stomach ache linked to constipation

The Milky Way

Granite seen under a microscope

Self portrait as a material text

References:

Chandrasekera, V. (2023) The Saint of Bright Doors Oxford: Solaris

Gershon, M. D., & Margolis, K. G. (2021). The gut, its microbiome, and the brain: connections and communications. The Journal of clinical investigation, 131(18), e143768. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI143768

Seth, A., (2021) Being you: A new science of consciousness. London: Penguin.

See also:

Up close and far away: The macro and the micro
Drawing texture
Drawing and quantum theory
Powers of 10
Macro and micro: Embodied networks

Category theory and drawing

Every now and again I go back to mathematics as a visual discipline. It is fundamental to our understanding of the world and its visualisation processes can be used across all disciplines. It is usually geometry that people like myself begin with when working with mathematical ideas and in the visual arts geometry is often linked with perspective and technical drawing systems, especially as a measuring tool. For instance we use right angled verticals to assess other angles, we assess the rotation of our looking through angles of degrees, find heights of buildings by using trigonometric relationships; the rise of computer aided design cementing these relationships. However there are other aspects of visual thinking that come directly out of thinking with numbers and the one I've recently begun to appreciate is 'category theory'. Like so many things in this world, my interest began from something said to me in conversation. I was having a coffee with an ex-student of fine art, who is also a university lecturer in computing and he was helping me think though some ideas about how one thing represents another, or is like something but is not the same as something. I was trying to think around some of the work I had done representing things we don't see but can feel, such as loneliness or pain. In trying to make an equivalence I was worried that in translation I was losing particular associations that only worked in verbal languages. My associate began drawing and asked me if I had ever heard of Category Theory*, an area of mathematics that I was soon to realise had all sorts of resonance in relation to my own thought processes, especially when I found out that as a theory it could be used to get over the idea of one thing being equal to another. The escape from equality being something I decided was similar to my own worries about whether or not what I was doing represented 'reality' in the way I needed it to; I needed to escape from the problem of the noumenon or the thing-in-itself.
But what is category theory? It seems to me that it's to do with how you group things together. For instance, is there a set with 2.5 elements? As sets of things are collections of equal units, the answer would be no. But there's a "groupoid" with 2.5 elements. To get it, just take a set with 5 elements and fold it in half. The point in the middle gets folded over, and becomes half a point.

The physical and visual image here is a powerful drawing thought idea and it allows us to think in 'groupoids' as well as 'sets'. This 'trick' allows us to see that there are other possibilities of arraigning things, and in that thought lies the possibility of creating an interesting metaphor, one that suggests that things are not always as they appear to be. For instance 1 + 2 = 3 could be questioned. Only 3 can equal 3 in the sense of being exactly the same as 3. 1 + 2 being something else, it is a single thing that is being added to a double thing, not a treble thing that has always been a treble thing. In it's history a treble thing might point to a time when it was a double thing that was added to a single thing, but that is a very different history to that of a treble thing that has always been a treble thing. This is of course opening another door, because there will also be things that were first of all double and then they were added to a single, thus forming a treble thing. 

Category theory is all about possibilities and it is driven by diagrams. So if we look at the three dots in set 'G', at first sight it looks as if these could be equal to the three dots of set 'H', but then we realise that the dots could be matched up in several ways.  

Category theory diagrams

In category theory the dots are objects. The arrows as seen in the top diagram are also important because they don't just indicate possible movement or connection, they indicate a real change in the identity of the object. What has gone on before is an object's history and this history will change its nature. A thousand pounds saved up by a poor person over a lifetime might look the same as a thousand pounds used by a millionaire to pay for a night's stay in a hotel, but in reality they are totally different sums of money. 

Category theory questions the use of the equal sign, which states that things are exactly the same. There are important complexities in the way quantities are related which suggest that  there is a need to reformulate mathematics in the looser language of equivalence and into this looser language we might be able to slip in the language of art, in that it is constantly been used to find equivalences for other things. 

It is interesting to look at the relationships set out in the diagram below. The slippage between individual instances of diverse forms and universal principles is one whereby it is impossible to define where the dividing line is. In particular it is impossible to determine the exact edge between the microscopic and the macro world, all the scales from Angstroms to meters are found in a biological entity like myself, and the complex hierarchical assemblies of various building blocks that we are made of seem to follow principles of form that can be found in other systems as well. In this way we can begin to discover new metaphors, ones that rely on deep structural echoing and that Giesa, Wood, Spivak and Buehler (2011) have termed “concept webs” or “semantic networks”. 

A concept web

This diagram shows how you can think about the ways that the building blocks of protein can be connected and where possible weaknesses might be. 

Giesa et al. describe how category theory can be used to link the fundamental structural principles behind biological protein materials with entities such as social networks, by comparing both of their underlying structural principles. To do this they have constructed the term 'ologs'. An olog follows a rigorous mathematical formulation based on category theory, therefore it is suitable for sharing concepts with other ologs. They show that an olog for the protein and an olog for a certain social network feature have identical category-theoretic representations and that there is an isomorphism between them; thus demonstrating that the relationship between structure and function at different hierarchical levels, can be effectively represented by ologs. Because metaphors have always been developed by artists looking for similarities between things, I also think that although Giesa et al. indicate that this type of thinking could help engineering, life sciences, and medicine, I see no reason to not add art into the mix. It would seem to me that if biological materials evolved to perform specific biological functions, then the higher-level structures that biological entities like ourselves also evolved such as societies, may well have deep down core similarities, as certain mathematical patterns are no doubt more useful than others in the creation of structures that can survive in a hostile world. It would seem therefore that in order to reflect upon the workings of a natural system, we do not need to understand everything about it, only the principles out of which we believe the functions arise. Therefore a drawing can represent an equivalence by showing how patterns from different models of thinking can find themselves grouped together. In doing so it can also be a tool that refers to and evaluates differences in historical backgrounds, so that when rendering two similar images of a hundred pesos it does not simply make them the same, but renders them different by nature. The problem of the noumenon or the thing-in-itself is also overcome because of the concept of representing an equivalence, in this way there is never any need to reproduce the thing in itself, only equivalences and they can be many and varied and always subject to interpretation. 

Two examples of 100 peso notes

In the case of the 100 peso notes, in some ways you could think of them as being exactly the same, in the sense that in their original function as money exchange you could get goods to the value of100 pesos for either of them. In mathematical terms this would mean that note one =  note two. However if regarded as an equivalent, note one still performs the same monetary function as note two but it has other meanings as well, because its history is different. You could think of Duchamp's 'Bottle Rack' as being another type of example. 

*Category theory formalises mathematical structure and its concepts in terms of a labeled directed graph called a category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows.

References

Giesa, T., Wood, E., Spivak, D.I. and Buehler, M.J., 2011. Category Theoretic Analysis of Hierarchical Protein Materials and Social Networks. Accessed from: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023911

Hartnett, K (2019) With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes From Equality

Accessed from: https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-category-theory-mathematics-escapes-from-equality-20191010/

See also:

Drawing on money

Between art, geometry and science

Resemblance, mimesis and communication

Abstraction, mathematics and metaphor

Developing surfaces in an age of CGI

About paper, about mobile phone screens and fingertips

Up close it's easy to see why paper is good at holding on to the grainy bits of charcoal or graphite as they break off. 

Rag paper

Cartridge paper

The fact is that a micro-world is going on all the time whilst we are drawing but is usually just below the levels of our perceptual awareness. Whatever we are doing, our consciousness of what is happening is very limited and we are therefore unaware of many of the consequences of our actions.

However we don't use pencils as much as we use our mobile phones in present day society, so I have decided to look at the contact made between the human fingertip and a mobile phone touchscreen. But before I do that I think its important to remind everyone that in many ways using our fingers to make drawings on our mobile phone screens links us back to a time of drawing with our fingers in mud or sand, the brush and the pencil being less sensitive devices that we are learning to do without. 

A close up view of a finger and a mobile screen

Touch relies on some pretty sophisticated physiology. Using a mobile phone requires using your fingertips to do lots of swiping and sliding (haptic tasks), therefore an awareness of how touch works is important if you are to begin thinking about what is happening just beneath the everyday surface of your consciousness. Touching something else is central to the process of change, it is contact that forms other things; for instance as wind blown dust touches a rock it slowly and inexorably begins the process of erosion, or if you want to get technical, aeolian processes are at work.

This sandstone outcrop has been carved by the wind

Contact can be rough and sudden, a bullet cuts into a wall as its force is spent, or slow and gentle, as the tiny shards of shells of micro organisms drift down through sea waters and settle to build up what will one day become chalk deposits or spasmodic, like the breaking off of flakes of charcoal as an artist makes a drawing on sheets of paper. 

Think of those things that you or others have touched over and over again, the polished toe of a venerated statue, the handle of a door that has been used for many years, you don't notice a change at the time, but something always happens when one thing comes into contact with another. 

The polished toes of a statue of bishop Grgur 

Touch shapes things, both the thing being touched and the touching finger is shaped by the contact. But we hardly notice what happens. It takes thousands of touches to polish Grgur's toes and each of those touches would have knocked a few cells off the end of someone's fingertip. Each stroke of your fingers across the screen of your mobile is also making things happen, a very complex series of changes are taking place, and you are being changed by the contact, so lets see how.

Human fingertips can feel the difference between a smooth surface and one with a pattern embedded just 13 nanometres deep, or about a human hair width. Epidermal ridges on the surface of our fingertips allow us to differentiate between a wide range of textures, materials, temperatures, and pressures. We all have a unique pattern of these fingerprints but the pattern is not crucial to the function. Their importance is that just underneath the ridges are mechanoreceptors that respond to tactile stimulus. Friction caused by movement of the fingertip along the surface of the computer screen stimulates these mechanoreceptors, which then transmit tactile information to the brain. Your skin has three layers and receptors that let the body sense touch are located in the top two layers of the skin; the epidermis and the dermis.

The epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, also provides a waterproof barrier and creates our skin tone. The dermis, beneath the epidermis, contains tough connective tissue, usually hair follicles (our fingertips are hairless) and sweat glands and the deeper subcutaneous tissue (hypodermis) is made of fat and connective tissue. 

The epidermis has itself five different layers. Stratum basale, stratum spinosum, stratum granulosum, stratum lucidum and stratum corneum and if you look at the diagram below you can see how the shape of the cells allows the top layers to flake off, (dead cells) providing an ever changing and very interesting surface that is central to what happens when we touch anything. We in effect leave traces of ourselves on whatever surfaces we come into contact with. Just as the charcoal is flaked off on contact with the drawing paper, we are ourselves being flaked off as we drag our fingers across the surface of our mobile phone screens. This is an on-going process, new cells being formed at the junction between the dermis and epidermis, which slowly work their way towards the surface of the skin ready to be released in a process that constantly replaces shed skin cells. 

The epidermis

The receptors in our fingers are all part of the body’s somatosensory system, a huge network of nerve endings and touch receptors. This system is responsible for all the sensations we feel; cold, hot, smooth, rough, pressure, tickle, itch, pain, vibrations, and more. The four main types of receptors are; mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors, pain receptors, and proprioceptors.

Different receptors collect different information, for instance a rapidly adapting receptor can respond to a change in stimulus very quickly, which means that it can sense right away when the skin is touching an object and when it stops touching that object. However, these receptors can’t sense how long the skin is touching an object. Slowly adapting sensors do not respond to a change in stimulus very quickly. These are very good at sensing the continuous pressure of an object touching or indenting the skin but are not very good at sensing when the stimulus started or ended. Both rapid and slow receptors respond to changes in pressure as you push your fingers across the surface of your mobile phone, these are ‘mechanoreceptors’; receptors that respond to sensations such as pressure, vibrations and texture and their only function is to perceive indentions and vibrations as they effect the skin. The four types are; Merkel’s disks, Meissner’s corpuscles, Ruffini’s corpuscles, and Pacinian corpuscles. The most sensitive being Merkel’s disks and Meissner’s corpuscles. Merkel’s disks being slowly adapting receptors and Meissner’s corpuscles rapidly adapting receptors, enabling your skin to perceive both when you begin touching something and how long the object is touching the skin. Therefore that moment when you first touch your mobile phone screen is signalled to the brain by your Meissner corpuscles, Merkel’s disks then take over telling the brain that this is a continuous activity and when you take your finger off the screen, Meissner corpuscles signal the change. This is all going on in the epidermis and outer layers of the dermis and located deeper in the dermis and along joints, tendons, and muscles of your finger are Ruffini’s corpuscles and Pacinian corpuscles. These mechanoreceptors can feel sensations such as vibrations traveling down bones and tendons, rotational movement of limbs, and the stretching of skin. These are helping you control that finger and apply changes in direction and pressure to it as you decide to do the things you need to do with your phone. However that is not all that’s happening, the screen might be warm or cool to your touch, depending on perhaps how the system is working, for instance a flaw could be causing the device to overheat and you will be made aware of the danger by ‘thermoreceptors’; receptors that pick up sensations related to the temperature of objects the skin feels. They are found in the dermis layer of the skin and they are divided into hot and cold receptors. 

Your phone’s screen may however be broken, and if so you might prick your finger on one of the edges of the broken screen and in this case ‘pain receptors’ will come into play; these are the nocireceptors. They can detect pain that is caused by mechanical stimuli (cut or scrape), thermal stimuli (burn), or chemical stimuli (poison from an insect sting).These receptors cause a feeling of sharp pain to encourage you to quickly move away from a harmful stimulus such as a broken piece of glass or a hot stove top. They also have receptors that cause a dull pain in an area that has been injured to encourage you not to use or touch that limb or body part until the damaged area has healed. 

There are other receptors that are vital to your holding a phone and these are the ‘proprioceptors’ or one’s own awareness-of-self receptors. They sense the position of the different parts of the body in relation to each other and the surrounding environment. Proprioceptors are found in tendons, muscles, and joints. These cells detect changes in muscle length and muscle tension, i.e. without them you would be dropping your phone all the time because you would become totally uncoordinated. 

While many receptors have specific functions to help us perceive different touch sensations, you never find just one type active at any one time. When using your phone, your hand can perceive many different sensations just by holding it.

Mechanoreceptors can sense that your hand is stretching around your mobile, whilst at the same time sensing that pressure is being exerted to both hold the phone and push your fingers around the phone's screen surface. 

It’s also important to remember that when your fingertip touches that screen, the mechanoreceptors that are activated begin a chain of events by signaling to the nearest neuron that they touched something. This neuron then transmits this message to the next neuron which gets passed on to the next one and on it goes until the message gets to the brain. Now the brain can process information received about the surface that your hand touched and send messages back to your hand via this same pathway to let the hand know what to do next in order for the brain to carry on getting more information. 

Your brain though gets wildly disproportionate information about touch from different parts of your body. The fingers you are using are packed with sensors, but other parts of your body, such as your back, have very few, reflecting the fact that we have very different relationships with various parts of our body. 

How touch sensors are represented in the brain

The part of your brain that processes touch information has embedded within it a very distorted map of your body. It over-represents areas that have lots of fine touch receptors (like the face, the lips, the tongue, and the fingers) and under-represents areas that don't have many receptors. This ‘map’ is constantly changing, because areas of the touch-sensing parts of your brain that you use a lot tend to expand and take over neighbouring territory. Therefore the area of your brain that processes information from fingers used to control your mobile, will expand the more you use them. 

This relationship that we have with the mobile is very important because there is another system at work, the emotional touch system, which is mediated by special sensors called C tactile fibers, and it conveys information much more slowly. It's vague in terms of where the touch is happening, but it sends information to a part of the brain called the posterior insula that is crucial for the development of socially-bonding touches; such as a hug, holding hands, or sexual foreplay. 

This is where it gets creepy; the touch screen of your mobile is looked at with the same intensity as you would look at a person that you were sexually attracted to, when you brush your fingers over the touch sensitive screen, it is exactly that, touch sensitive, just like those people who we have intimate relations with. The screen is made in layers just like human skin, it’s smooth texture is very like skin, it gives slightly as you touch it, just like skin, its slightly warm because you keep it on your person and most importantly you have built up an emotional relationship with it just as you would another human being. Therefore unlike most other objects, engaging with your mobile can cause C tactile fibres to be triggered. You adjust the speed of your finger as you stroke, so your vibrational senses are able to detect slippage and friction, but you are not just seeking surface change, you are adding in an emotional feeling as you would when relating to another human being. This sort of makes sense because the mobile is mainly used to communicate with other humans, but because we invest so much of our emotional energy in this device, we have little left for other humans. 

But what about the thing being touched? The mobile phone screen often gets pretty battered in the contact improvisation dance it has with human beings. 

 

A detail of Duchamp's large glass

Formally the broken glass is reminiscent of Duchamp's 'Bride Stripped Bare' which was also broken by accident, and the results finally embraced as a chance action that seemed to be an acceptable part of the work's journey. An example of contact improvisation, where  the artist accepted that the elements outside of his control were giving as much to the work as himself. 

However, the screen is not designed to be broken, it is designed to be touched and there are various ways that designers have come up with to make sure that when you touch a screen the information is transmitted to a phone's operating system. 

The touch screen on a mobile phone is a display that can locate the presence and location of a touch within the display area. It needs a minimum of three components to be able to get information to the phone's operating system, a touch sensor, controller and software driver. 

I was still at art college when the first touch sensor was developed in 1971 by Sam Hurst at the university of Kentucky, so you are working with technology that is already 50 years old. 

The touch sensor is usually a clear glass panel with a touch responsive area, this is placed over a display screen, so that the responsive area covers the viewable area of the screen.  I.e. if you can see an icon you can touch the touch responsive area above it.  An electric current is made to pass through the touch sensor, this carries signals which are changed when pressure is exerted on the screen and the change in a signal is used to determine the location of touch on the screen. The controller connects the touch sensor to the computer operating system in your phone. It takes data from the touch sensor and translates it into information that the computer can understand. 

A controller component, in this case a MPR121, is designed to work with the specific technology that the screen uses to collect data and has lots of pin connections because of the need to connect up a complicated array of sensors all collecting information about where your finger is touching the screen. In this case the technology is capacitive, which is the system an I-Phone uses. 

Diagrams showing typical connections and links to electrical power supply 

Before I move on to look at the workings in more detail, it's I hope worth reminding you how important drawing is to coming to an understanding of all this complex information, the diagrams above are both beautiful and informative, and cross over disciplines. 

The software driver allows the touch screen and the computer to work together. This is very like what happens when you add a new printer to your PC, you always need to install new driver software in order to get access to the printer. The driver ensures that a touch on the mobile screen operates the same way that clicking and moving your mouse operates in relation to a computer monitor.  It tells the mobile phone’s operating system how to interpret the touch information event that is sent from the controller. 

A capacitive screen such as that used on an I-Phone, consists of an insulator like glass, coated with a transparent conductor like ITO, (Indium-tin-oxide). Touch then distorts the screen's electromagnetic field, which is measured as changes in signal intensity along both x and y axis. More than one layer is used so that separate information can be collected from each axis and then coordinate points plotted. 

Projected capacitive panels have multiple sensors, which means that they can detect more than one pressure difference at the same time, i.e. you can use more than one finger at the same time. 

When a fingertip comes into contact with a capacitative touchscreen, it uses the electrostatic conductivity of the human body as a means for input. Unlike resistive type touchscreens, electrostatic capacitive touchscreens are highly responsive, but if you turn your finger over and try and use your fingernail, you will find that nothing happens. This is a good way to test out what sort of screen technology your phone uses, it also explains why I-Phones are so sensitive to wet conditions. 

So if you are making a drawing on your I-Phone, your own body's electricity is being used at the point of contact. Capacitive touch-screen technology means that you aren't limited to simply pressing the screen in one place. The iPhone can detect the difference between your pressing the screen with one, two, three or four fingers. It can also detect gestures such as swiping or pinching. This sensitivity gives you a much wider range of controls for each individual application. It also helps make the user interface much more intuitive. For example, programmers can map your finger swipes to scrolling through a long page, or pulling two fingers apart to zoom in on an image. However for drawing purposes when you might want more pressure sensitivity a resistive type touchscreen could be better. Going back to that graphite pencil point breaking off onto the surface of the paper, its H or B grade could be seen as analogous to whether the touch screen is capacitive or resistive. 

Just as your internal sensing system uses a variety of inputs to determine what is happening at your fingertip, the mobile phone is using a variety of inputs to determine what is going on at the point of contact, so when you draw on your phone, as with all media, it is partly you and partly the media that shapes what happens.

Technical drawing of an I Phone

However the I-Phone was once an idea in someone's mind, and as such this was realised as a technical drawing before it was manufactured. Therefore you might want to think about its fascinating 'thing' history in more detail, especially as information begins to become entangled into a knot of correspondences. For instance indium-tin-oxide (ITO) a material that is used in mobile phones because of its electrical conductivity and optical transparency  as well as the ease with which it can be deposited as a thin film, is also very expensive. The high cost and limited supply of indium is a real problem, as well as the fact that during the process of mining, production and reclamation, workers are exposed to it. It is mainly mined in China, Japan, USA, the Republic of Korea, and Canada. Indium lung disease is developed through contact with indium containing dusts and there are several proven cases of workers coming into contact with indium, developing conditions such as pulmonary fibrosis, emphysema, and granulomas. As I drag my fingertip across my phone's surface in order to make a small drawing in its note application, at the same time a mine worker is developing granulomas when his or her immune system attempts to wall off substances it perceives as foreign but is unable to eliminate because their body doesn't usually have to ward off long term exposure to indium. 

A granuloma

As usual with these long posts I'm beginning to ramble, but hopefully the point has been made. As I pointed out at the beginning of this post, our consciousness of what is happening is very limited and we are unaware of most of the consequences of our actions. Drawing on a mobile phone is no different to drawing with a pencil, both are about the contact made between one thing and another, both are media specific, both on contact with something else cause change to happen at a macro and a micro level and our awareness of all these things is always partial. Pencils have long chains of conditionality* behind them and so do mobile phones and as people that use both of them, the more aware you are about what goes on the more choices there are as to how and why you might use them. 

* In Buddhist thought Pratityasamutpada means 'dependent origination' or 'conditionality'.  It can best be understood as the interconnectedness of all existence or each and every action has a consequence. 

See also:

The macro and the micro
The pencil and sustainability
More thoughts about paper
Pencils and erasers
Drawing hands

Swell paper for making touch drawings