Tropic of Charlie
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- Christopher Alexander
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Reflecting on the Pilot G-2 07
Have you ever taken a moment to ask yourself if your life might be fundamentally different if you’d have chosen a different pen? Kind of like those bottle episodes of early 21st Century sitcoms trying to explain parallel universes? I remember the school supply run before my first year of middle school (and first year back in school outside of the home), asking my mom if I could get a pack of Pilot G-2 07s. But, as I compile a growing list of reflections on things I learned, experienced, and noted using this pen, I’m humbled to find it’s role in really key life-changing ways, I might not have become an architect, met my wife, or be drawing today.
Unlike the Uniball Signo 0.38 I’d borrow from my dad, the Pilot G-2 07 can glide over the page and you don’t find you produce much friction or imprints in the paper. It also disassembled easily allowing for ‘secret’ messages to be stored between the ink cartridge and the casing, and the ink catridge itself, when coupled with a long narrow tube like a blinds rod, made a robust ‘blow-gun.’ It’s mechanical retractability-loud, quasi-judgmental in a quiet classroom, but smooth *click-CLICK*-kept the ink explosions to a minimum and allowing me to take them anywhere. Even the clean lines I’d draft with lead-holders and ink on vellum lacked the satisfaction I felt doodling in the margins of my notebook during my humanities courses with the Pilot G-2 07. Clean and forgiving, it allowed me to like my drawing enough to think of it as an ability worth investing in and exploring. It taught me that while ink has a permanence, mistakes are only mistakes if you see them as such, revealing a host of ways to insinuate ‘mistakes’ into the work as necessary elements. The Pilot G-2 07 challenged my perfectionist proclivities, ultimately allowing me to shift career trajectories in college from Engineering to Architecture.
How would my wife and I’s story be different, had we not met as a freshman in college, in our first class, doodling out the first few phrases of a lifelong conversation? I think my drawings of surfboards could easily have been seen for what they were: the ravings of a land-locked surfer, had I been using any other pen. But more realistically, the Pilot G-2 07 had transformed my perception of the classroom from something boring and toxic, to a place where learning of all kinds (including a classic meet-cute) could take place irrespective of the given course content.
Today I find I use the Pilot G-2 07 to do nearly all my analog drawing, and after nearly twenty years of use it is still sparking key questions about tools, my work, mediums, and more fundamentally: What even is a drawing? Is the drawing the ink on the page or is it the registration of the gesture of the hand that produces it? Is the drawing just a recording of where the pen has been, or it’s position and momentum across time? Or, in the Pilot G-2 07’s case with a roller-ball, a registration of the momentum and inertia of the roller-ball itself, as it is spun by friction associated with the position and momentum of the pen across paper but also dependent on the pressure of the internal spring and the visconsity of the gel ink itself? In just a hundred years, we’ve moved from scratching a soft metal into paper, or letting ink drip out of a quill or fountain pen to incorporating all this additional information about the lines we draw into the lines themselves. Position, momentum, and weight of stroke, along with momentum of the ball and how ink flows which is dependent on the momentum and amount of grab the ball has rather than the actual movement of the pen itself.
As I draw both by hand and digitally, informing alogorithms on how I draw, the Pilot G-2 07 has challenged my conception of what it means to draw. It was invented and distributed just in time for me to find it as a kid and use it, but this seemingly inevitable refinement of twentieth century pen technology seems eerily entwined with how we think about digital drawing as well, specifically N.U.R.B.S. (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) based curvature, which was primarily developed so we could create animate things in movies and video games. At their essence, all of these curves are informed by multiple layers of dynamic information over and above the path of the line itself. Perhaps we perceive all these layers of input and output registered in the ink as the vibrancy we relish in the drawings, and perhaps this is why I find the Pilot G-2 07 so special: The Pilot G-2 07 is the digital turn masquerading as a simple rollarball pen.