A building in New Orleans (photo: New Orleans Not arial Archives)

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"Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history"--or so reads the original draft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's congressional address following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the brief time before he gave his speech, however, the President struck the two final words and, in his own hand, changed them to "infamy." What might the date have lived in if he had been using a word processor? And how would we have ever known the difference?" by Nick Bourbakis In the mid-1970s, General Dynamics, an aerospace contractor to the U.S. military, was building some of the most sophisticated aircraft of the day. Typical of this period, complex prototypes were developed over several years, leaving behind piles and mountains of paperwork. The process was labor-intensive. Draftsmen produced original, hand-drawn documents, not only for initial designs, but for each of the innumerable subsequent revisions. As required by the government, each revision was then reviewed, sorted, and checked by "checkers," who filed the separate documents as "appendices." These were used to understand what had been arrived at, and more important, how and why. Physical evidence of revision, the appendices formed a tangible strata of the development of ideas over time. As avionic design was becoming more sophisticated, though, so were the tools used to design it, and General Dynamics began to use some of the first computer-aided design (CAD) programs, which allowed designers to draft directly on the screen with a flexibility and speed unimaginable with indelible ink. The A-12 Navy aircraft was one of the first planes to be designed using these new digital tools. Its designers were able to continually revise previous ideas and specifications directly on the very same "document," now in the form of a digital file. Such files had no physical history; they were a malleable series of bits that described the plane's design only in its most recent iteration. Checkers struggled to keep track of changes, now that no traces remained of them. In the end, the A-12 itself was left with no physical or visual history. Canceled after extraordinary cost overruns, the aircraft was never built. Still, General Dynamics took from it an important lesson: these digital tools, though powerful, left virtually no record of the process or thought involved in the plane's design. The A-12 was not only a ghost, it was a ghost without a story. The casualty of this early transition to computer-aided design was the draft, the physical record of the past that serves to inform the present. The draft is a document with its own history inscribed upon it. It is thought and process made visible--or rather, left visible. The palimpsest is the most exaggerated form of the draft; in order to conserve valuable parchment and paper, early scribes would write directly on top of an existing manuscript, sometimes obliterating text, but often leaving patches showing, textual fingerprints of the earlier lives of the document. Gore Vidal uses this idea in naming and constructing his 1995 autobiography, Palimpsest: ". . . a parchment, etc., that has been written upon twice; the original writing having been rubbed out. This is pretty much what my kind of writer does anyway. Starts with life; makes a text; then a revision--literally a second seeing, an afterthought . . . writing something new over the first layer of text." Similarly, paintings frequently reveal pentimenti, earlier visions and versions that inform the visible image. For a painter, revising is a process of adding layers, working in relationship to (and with) the past that is directly underneath. In the work of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, dynamism resides in such endless revisions; the final canvas is a mapping of alternative solutions that interpenetrate the surface. Pentimenti (literally, repentances) are the previous lives of the work, which, through their errors and false starts, suggest the final forms of the top layer, the end result. In the palimpsest, in the pentimento, each layer informs the next; each new word, image, and idea stands in explicit juxtaposition to the previous forms of the work. The layerings of the creative process are not limited to text or visual works; buildings often evolve in a similar fashion. Existing structures are rarely razed by their new occupants; more often, they're adapted, one step at a time, to suit their new use. In Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn (Viking, 1994), an architect explains the process: "Porches fill in by stages . . . the family puts screens on the porch one summer because of the bugs. Then they could glass it in and make it part of the house. But now it's cold, so they add a duct from the furnace and some insulation, and now they realize they're going to beef up the foundation and the roof. It happens that way because they can always visualize the next stage based on what's already there." Brand illustrates this with a pair of Greek Revival houses in New Orleans, identical when they were built in 1857. Over the next century or so, these buildings took paths as individual as their occupants; one pushed the facade to the property line, added a garage and an attic story. The other added a fourth story and classic New Orleans balcony rails. Today, though they no longer have their original roofs, both owners have constructed new roof cornices that are identical not only to each other, but to their original form. This is the nature of the draft: certain forms and ideas remain visible in much later stages of development, even when they no longer refer to their original function. Successive layers borrow from those below; in the case of the cornices, they remain as visible sediment of the many changes and histories of two houses. As the palimpsest suggests, writing has been especially capable of retaining this sediment of past ideas. Indeed, a kind of grammar has evolved for altering text--notably, proofreaders' marks. The simplest form is the strikethrough, or crossing out (e.g., "world history"). Stricken text is still important but cannot be considered "real" or final; it is the ghost of the document, as in legal transcripts of court proceedings, where words "struck from the official record" are represented by strikethrough text, as if to suggest: Read this but disregard it. Other forms of revision are not as kind to the history of a document. The censor's mark actually obscures the text it refers to, as in an FBI file made public only after key events and names have been obscured by black bars. But though the past is no longer legible, it is still apparent--the document reveals that these things exist, albeit as irretrievable information. Behind the crude process of blacking out text is a certain technology: the photocopier. Documents released by the FBI are copies; the original file retains all the original information. Facsimiles can eliminate data as needed. Every advance in "document technology"--writing directly over earlier writing, typewriters that can strike through text, the photocopiers that allow the FBI to selectively black out information--brings this data closer and closer to actual deletion. The ability (and tendency) to discard a document's history creates something without a past, only a present. This endless present seems to be the manifest destiny of the latest information technology: the digital document. Almost every medium--from writing to architecture to filmmaking--now takes advantage of the computer, allowing for new levels of flexibility and efficiency. But the digital processes for creating and editing text, images, movies, etc., have led to a world where the remnants of missteps and mistakes are overwritten, wiped away. The antithesis of the palimpsest with its visible history, documents on the computer are reduced to a constantly updated present tense. The once deeply stratified work-in-process, with evidence of thought and elapsed time, is replaced by the efficiency of a computer file conceived not as archive, but as endlessly revisable final product. The fundamental pre-digital paradigm is one of depth: an idea, a document, a building, has layers that extend backward through time. This depth has real value; the hand-revised manuscript of Ulysses, for example, tells much about Joyce's writing processes as well as revealing what the book might have been. Erasures on an architectural sketch are just-visible evidence of similar processes and potential results. Early digital tools ignored the lessons of layers, imposing the binary nature of data (ones and zeros, on and off, present and absent) upon documents that might otherwise exhibit a rich and complex stratification of past and present. Photoshop 2.5, released in 1993, was one of the more sophisticated image processing programs of the time. Typical of such software, images created with it were "flat"--a single layer of pixels that could be on or off. There was nothing "behind" them, and when changed, the pixels replaced each other, rather than building upon one another like pentimenti. To be sure, one could save each revision of an image separately, but that is a different thing altogether. De Kooning worked on top of the past; the Photoshop user worked on top of the latest, and was forced to replace it in the process. Still, the idea of saving multiple versions of a document--drafts, in a limited sense--suggests that the shortcomings of digital tools are not insurmountable. Users of Photoshop and many other programs have developed "workarounds," techniques that let them work in a draft-like way, that allow the past to remain visible. Like Photoshop 2.5, QuarkXPress, a common page-layout program, is oriented toward "flat" documents. The size, shape, and position of text and images in a Quark file can quickly be changed--with no trace of their original size, orientation, or visual idea. Mark Michaelson, design director for New York magazine, uses the "pasteboard" area in QuarkXPress--the workspace around the page, comparable to the a manuscript's margins--to keep earlier ideas (alternate photos, type treatments, headlines) in sight. By throwing all of his previous elements onto the pasteboard, Michaelson retains a pre-digital way of working--keeping unused elements and earlier solutions over to the side. Because earlier elements are not eradicated, but shifted to the margins, his new ideas are free to build on this previous work. Such adaptations and workarounds have demonstrated to software companies that users of any kind of creative tools need to keep the past in mind, if not in sight. In its later releases of Photoshop (3.0 and 4.0), Adobe added a new function, "layers," which allows for documents with complex and accessible histories. Changes to an image are no longer made on a single plane of pixels; rather, they appear on successive layers. Revisions stack up, like on layers of tracing paper, without obliterating previous versions. At Oven Digital, a Web design company in New York City, images often have hundreds of layers, each revision "on top" of the last, each of which can be revised on its own. One can shuffle these at will, trying an earlier (lower) element on top of the latest; or the top layers can be made temporarily invisible, revealing what an image looked like in the recent past. The presence of data is no longer dependent on its visibility; a user can build up a document with pentimenti that, unlike genuine pentimenti, are reversible. The makers of QuarkXPress have also begun to address these concerns through the introduction of the Quark Publishing System (QPS), which attempts to re-create many aspects of the draft by completely documenting a file's history. Andrew Miller, managing director of Image Inc., a consulting company that integrates QPS software into existing publishing networks, explains that the system produces a revision trail for Quark documents: "It retains a history of all the changes a document goes through, even by multiple authors. It can tell you who did what to what and when they did it." The "trails" produced in such a system bear no visual resemblance to the draft, but retain its functions: it has a history, even if this history takes the form of a "report" rather than graphite traces or a cornice detail. Both Quark and Photoshop began as translations of real-world techniques--working with the pasteboard and the blank page. The latest digital tools, though, not only mimic the draft, as Photoshop's layers do, they are redefining the draft entirely. Richard Powers, author of Galatea 2.2 and other novels that deal with the imposition of the digital realm upon the very physical plane of humanity, has forsaken paper entirely. He writes everything on the computer. For Powers, the "outline pro-cessor" is just as important as the word processor. Built into Microsoft's ubiquitous Office 97, it allows Powers to manipulate, in ways previously impossible, the numerous different outlines he creates for a novel. "The whole idea of the architecture of a novel changes," he says. "With the outline processor, with linking and embedding, you can begin to think spatially." Similar in function to the hypertext links of the World Wide Web, Microsoft's "object linking and embedding" allows notes, thoughts, even entire documents to be attached to other texts and ideas as they are developed, with links between them. Over time, this "meta-document"--this new kind of draft--can grow and change without the need for any deletion; texts are simply linked or unlinked. Meaning is altered by the ordering and reordering of items, without any loss. Related ideas no longer have to occupy the same space, or any space. The draft is freed from the limitations of the physical, two-dimensional page. Powers is not the only one to find liberation at the computer. George Lucas, by making modest additions and changes to his Star Wars trilogy, has placed himself at the vanguard of artists using digital tools to reinvent the ways they work. As images--in this case, 24 of them every second--are transformed into bits and bytes of data, filmmakers like Lucas are able to compose, render, and alter their work frame by frame, manipulating them endlessly. In the case of Star Wars, this happened 20 years after the fact; for Lucas, armed with the latest software and computers, the Star Wars released in 1977 became a first draft, a revisable work. Films can now be collections of digital documents (albeit huge ones) no different from any other computer files; when they're completed, they're simply "spit out" back onto film. In Wired magazine last year, Lucas explained how digital technology has allowed him to alter the filmmaking process: "Instead of making film into a sequential assembly-line process where one person does one thing, takes it, and turns it over to the next person, I'm turning it more into the process of a painter or sculptor. You work on it for a bit, then you stand back and look at it and add some more onto it, then stand back and look at it some more. You basically end up layering the whole thing." By adding new scenes and characters to the Star Wars trilogy, Lucas reminds us of Stewart Brand's porch-builder, who wound up building an addition to the house. "I'm of a carpenter mentality," Lucas told Wired. "I have a rough idea of what I want to do, but I'm going to start hammering, and then when I get along here, I'll look at it and say 'We should move this wall here, it would be even better.' " In a way, technology has come full circle. All the word processors and Photoshops and page layout programs in use have indeed killed the draft, at least as we understand it from Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech and early versions of the Declaration of Independence and Walt Whitman's hand-corrected copies of Leaves of Grass. But the latest generation of technology signals a new idea of what a draft is; it allows artists to become Lucas's "carpenter," lending to things once fixed in stone (or film) the flexibility of carpentry, the mutability of pencil on paper, while preserving the history of their creation. "It makes the medium much more malleable," Lucas explained. "You can move things around and think in a more fluid style--and I love that." Nick Bourbakis is an artist who divides his time between Barcelona, Berlin, and Brisbane.

Keywords: draft, documents, designs, software, digital, process

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