Technology Quote by Buffy Sainte-Marie

There is a sly insistence on agency hiding inside this calmly technical description: the “tablet” isn’t magic, it’s a negotiation. Sainte-Marie frames digital art not as a futuristic leap but as a chain of choices we make before the image ever appears. The verb “tell” is doing heavy lifting. Hardware doesn’t “feel” like chalk or a wet brush; we instruct it to perform a metaphor, and the metaphor becomes the experience. That’s a quietly radical way to talk about technology: not as destiny, but as design.

The line also smuggles in a broader cultural argument about mediation. “The drawing shows up” reads passive, even inevitable, then she immediately pulls the curtain back: it only shows up the way you want if you’ve pre-decided the rules of translation. That’s subtext that lands far beyond graphics tablets. It’s a template for how contemporary life works: the interface looks natural, but it’s curated, parameterized, and usually built by someone with the power to define what counts as “natural.”

Context matters because Sainte-Marie isn’t just any commentator on tools; she’s an artist long attuned to how systems encode values. Here she’s demystifying the computer without dismissing it, locating creativity in the moment where human intent meets programmable constraint. The unfinished “it will” trails off like an open door: the machine will do what you specify, and what you fail to specify. That’s the point - the medium isn’t neutral, but it is negotiable, if you claim authorship of the settings.