Limbo is an ongoing project featuring an iPhone app that acts a live delivery system and pocket archive for the numerous drawings Simon Faithfull has made at different points around the globe. Produced in the trademark lo-tech graphic style that Faithfull first patented on a Palm Pilot, these bitmapped digital sketches offer fleeting but vivid impressions of sites (and sights) both exotic and mundane. Assembled on the move and generated on the fly, the drawings form a log of the far-flung places Faithfull has visited, that will be added to as he continues his travels. A miniature atlas of the artist’s irregular wanderings, the app incorporates many of the location-finding features of mobile phone technology. Alerting the user when a new drawing is made, Limbo automatically conjures that image out of the ether and delivers it to the iPhone screen. The project launched alongside another experience of travel-as-limbo – Faithfull’s one-week non-stop journey on Channel ferries shuttling back and forth between Dover and Calais in May 2011 orchestrated by Art Connexion.

As part of Create Festival 2011, Simon Faithfull was joined for a panel event by the novelist Iain Sinclair, whose intricate meditations on the history and architecture of East London have offered a singularly vivid picture of the city – and its changes – over many years. Faithfull and Sinclair revisited many of the East End locations where Faithfull has made his trademark Palm Pilot drawings. The panel event discussed their re-encounter with these places and their work in general.

More than 800 of Faithfull’s drawings created using an iPhone as a sketchbook were displayed in an exhibition across Leicester and online curated by Phoenix Square and Interact Gallery.