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Manga/anime artist Yoshitoshi ABe, creator and contributor to such series as Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei recently spoke at the Minnesota College of Art and Design. Mr. Yoshitoshi is a huge Mac fan, maintaining a homepage on Mac.com, releasing a self-published manga (known as “dojinshi”) for the iPhone in 20 countries and sneaking references to Apple products into his work.

After some difficulty in finding a DVI adapter for his Macbook Air, ABe began his presentation (through a translator) by talking about the human eye, and the iPhone:

“Does everyone here have a cell phone with a camera? Do you know how many megapixels its resolution is? On my iPhone, the resolution is 2 megapixels. The human eye has about 6 megapixels, but that’s RGB, so it’s about 2 megapixels for each color. And all the color is concentrated in the center of the eye (the following transcription is from memory):

“But when we see with the eye, we are not seeing reality. Our brain is taking all these bits of color and shape and combining them with our memory of what things look like. So for those of you in the back (of the auditorium), all you see is a dot, one pixels. I look like Mario. But your brain remembers what you’ve seen me look like, so you know I’m ABe.

“If you have time, do an experiment. Take three colored pencils, and hold them behind your back. Look straight ahead and slowly move one of the pencils into your peripheral vision. Your hand will look pink, because you remember it’s pink, but you will be confused as to the color of the pencil.

(ABe then displayed one of his pencil sketches: a young girl.)

“This is just lines on paper. But we see it as a face, perhaps because of some element, an eye. We remember what that looks like, and our brain creates a face. My drawings come out of memories I’ve had, and people come up to me and say that some of my drawings have drawn on memories within them, and I think that’s why.”

ABe took some additional questions, one of which related to his choice of releasing his dojinshi on a proprietary format like the iPhone, which could become obsolete in the future, and which not everyone could afford access to. ABe replied that his original drawings were drawn on paper, though many newer artists did indeed work entirely in computers. “Also,” he added with a laugh, “the iPhone has the ability to take screenshots of everything,” implying that it could be distributed in that way, “but please don’t do that.”