Drawing Machine

Tools for doodling and depicting

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38. The paintings in Addie Wagenknecht's Alone Together series (2017) are produced by a Roomba domestic robot as it traces around the artist's reclining body, smearing International Klein Blue paint as it goes. The work responds to both the technologized automation of labor and the history of action painting, where women's bodies were sometimes used as paint brushes.

Brief

Create a program that expands, augments, muddles, complicates, questions, analyzes, spoils, undermines, improves, accelerates, or otherwise alters the concept or act of drawing. Clarify the intent of your system, such as whether your project is a tool, toy, game, or performance instrument. Demonstrate its unique properties by using it to produce a series of at least three drawings.

Learning Objectives

Variations

Making It Meaningful

“Make your own paintbrush” is a classic art school prompt, encouraging students to create tools from parts of the body or found materials. The exercise personalizes and defamiliarizes the act of mark-making, and invites a deeper consideration of how tools and technologies shape artistic expression. The Drawing Machine assignment captures this spirit in the domain of software, opening up questions of constraints, autonomy, and augmentation in human-machine collaboration.

The act of drawing translates gesture from the body to the page through an apparatus. The primogenitor of today's computational drawing tools was Sketchpad, developed by Ivan Sutherland as part of his MIT PhD thesis in 1963, which made it possible for a person and a computer “to converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings.” i Widely credited as the first graphical user interface, Sketchpad substituted page for screen and leveraged the infinite malleability of virtual form for the first time. Its descendants, like AutoCAD, Photoshop, and Illustrator, are now mature products, and their interaction vocabularies have become standardized and ubiquitous and thus taken for granted. Innovating in this space now requires either breaking a core assumption about drawing, or experimenting with mark-making in unfamiliar contexts.

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39. Sougwen Chung collaborates with semi-autonomous robot arms to produce drawings like those in her Drawing Operations series (2015–2018).

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40. To create Tree Drawings (2007), Tim Knowles attaches pencils to the limbs of trees and captures the resulting marks on paper.

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41. The Sketch Furniture (2007) system by Swedish agency Front Design combines motion capture and digital fabrication. Using this system, a designer can record three-dimensional, freehand drawings of virtual furniture at a 1:1 scale, and then fabricate these forms using a large-scale 3D printer.

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42. Graffiti Research Lab was a collective dedicated to outfitting artists and protesters with open-source technologies for urban communication. In L.A.S.E.R. Tag (2007), a computer vision system tracks the spot of a user's handheld laser pointer. A high-power video projection, calibrated to the camera system, enables the user to display their tags at an architectural scale.

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43. Sloppy Forgeries (2018) by Jonah Warren is a game in which players, using computer mice and simplified color palettes, race to draw the most accurate replicas of famous paintings.

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44. In Julien Maire's Digit performance (2006), poetic texts magically appear beneath the artist's fingertip as he runs it across a sheet of white paper. Mechanisms from a thermal printer have been discreetly concealed under his hand.

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45. Paul Haeberli's DynaDraw (1989) is an early computational drawing environment in which the brush is modeled as a springy physical object with simulated mass, velocity, and friction. The augmentation of the drawing process with exaggerated virtual physics, and a range of adjustable parameters, leads to new forms of gestural and calligraphic play.

Additional Projects

Readings

  1. Pablo Garcia, “Drawing Machines,” DrawingMachines.org, accessed April 14, 2020.
  2. Jennifer Jacobs, Joel Brandt, Radomír Mech, and Mitchel Resnick, “Extending Manual Drawing Practices with Artist-Centric Programming Tools,” in Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2018), 1–13.
  3. Golan Levin, “2-02 (Drawing),” Interactive Art and Computational Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Spring 2016, accessed April 14, 2020.
  4. Zach Lieberman, “From Point A to Point B” (lecture, Eyeo Festival, Minneapolis, MN, June 2015), video, 7:20–19:00.
  5. Scott Snibbe and Golan Levin, “Instruments for Dynamic Abstraction,” in Proceedings of the Symposium on Nonphotorealistic Animation and Rendering (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2000).

Notes