DFF

Premium version: 3 week demo for free, then US$4 a year. You’ll get a push as soon as the new DFF drawing is ready. Choose your own app icon from the gallery, view a video of all DFF drawings from day 1 and navigate through the archive looking for your favourite moments.

Free version: 3 week Premium version, then receive one DFF drawing a day from the archive.

Daily Finger Frame is a digital drawing project which was started on 18 February 2011 by the artist Horacio Cassinelli.

Technique used: finger drawing on a smartphone screen.

Once a day, Cassinelli draws on the previous day's image and modifies it. Each new image is numbered and replaces yesterday's one in a succession that can be read as an open-ended story, a story without end. Daily Finger Frame is one of the first art projects to use an app as an integral part of the creative process.

Where did the idea of doing a drawing a day came from?

Horacio Cassinelli: I was already drawing daily in my sketchbooks as a student but what interested me with this project was the idea of the same drawing being modified day after day. It changes and evolves, like our body cells do during our life. We move from drawing to drawing and end up with something completely unexpected. We didn't see it coming at all.

Do you use a stylus pen?

Horacio Cassinelli: no, I learned to draw without seeing the tip of my finger. A smartphone screen is a very small and intimate space which contains worlds surprisingly wide. It's like a portable, pocket-sized studio. I often zoom into the image to draw details and lose sight of the whole picture, as when you're in front of a large-format painting.

What is left of the very first drawing now, so many years later?

Horacio Cassinelli: Probably not a pixel! Just like the ship of Theseus in Greek mythology, whose many parts were replaced one by one during the course of its journey, the initial drawing has changed in its entirety.

Does the Daily Finger Frame tell a story?

Horacio Cassinelli: It tells many stories. Some have already started off-screen when you come across them, others have no ending, we just move away from them. Characters, people, animals, landscapes come and go. The process is like that of Russian dolls, one image always comes out of the previous one and it never ends. Digital technology is the perfect medium for that.