Hello!
I want to show you guys the drawing machines I've been working on. Some of you may remember my painting apparatuses and attachments I made a few years ago. As I was with those devices, I'm interested in exploring how aspects of the creative process can be off loaded to, and hopefully enhanced by, a machine.
This one uses a motor to shake a rod which a sheet of paper is attached to, causing it to vibrate. The vibrations move drawing materials across the surface at random.
This video shows a lot of the machine.
This video shows some close ups of charcoal dust moving across the surface of the paper.
I'm not sure what to do with this kind of footage yet, but right now it seems more promising then the finished drawings I've been making like this.
Let me know if you have any thoughts about this.
-Cara
7 comments:
This is great! its such a simple machine too! I noticed in stop and shop the other day that most of the cashiers have been replaced by the robot checkouts. for some reason i find that relevant...
also, this machine makes sweet drawings! i wonder how this could translate to a performance...
also cara, do you think you could describe the construction of the machine from a technical perspective? I'm curious as to how the motors are working and would respond if given brief pulses of current, to induce a discrete motion, rather than a continous one. But srsly, sweet piece! you guys are sooooo cool!
once when i was in brooklyn my band played a show at this guys house that was also being an art gallery and i saw some drawing machines made my this guy tristan perich, heres some of them on his website. could be inspirational to you.
http://www.tristanperich.com/Art/Machine_Drawings/
I guess this builds on what Rod is getting at, but I'd like to hear more about the technical aspect too. When you say the materials are moving at random, is that actually the case? There seems to be a continuous directionality that the dust moves in (but random doesn't always appear random, i know!).
It reminded me of this in a really good way (like a live viewing of a time-lapse photograph, with the residue and such):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE
now, (if you'll stay aboard Hunter's Grand Train o' Thought for one more stop) this all got me thinking about replicating this in three dimensions. I can picture some topographical conversion where darkness of paper (i.e. frequency of dust-travel on that area) equates to depth. or some sifting shit with hardening cement (panning for art).
or what about your current iteration, but with audio vibrations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOKejKiNCxE
so you draw by talking into a microphone. your vocal chords do the vibrating anyway, might as well put them to use (vocal portraits and whatnot).
cool shit, cara. apologies for being all over the place.
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rad - i like that it's the surface moving that ends up making the marks rather than the pencil being the active element.
also this is the memory that hunter's thought-train led me to which may or may not be relevant but is pretty fun for the eyeballs in any case
http://www.wlos.jp/movie.html
I've done something in the past (one of the today) that sort of remind me of this, mostly in aesthetic quality. Whenever I'm on a bus, most notably the Fung Wah, I realize how shakey it is, so I lay a pad of paper in front of me, get a pen or pencil in my hand, hold it loosely touching the paper, and let the motion of the bus draw for me. The drawings usually tend to be only about 1 inch square, but they're pretty cool and I'm thinking about blowing them up to a huge scale. What I like about them is that they depend completely on passage of time, even though you can't necessarily pick out what happened first or last.
Whatever, I like that Cara. It's nifty.
Also, gang, I need to get my hands on a discman that nobody wants (I swear I had one but now it's lost somewhere) because I'm planning on making a tattoo gun. On that note, don't get drunk and pass out in my presence in the future, cause I'm really good at drawing dicks permanently.
Hello
Thank you for all of your comments/cool things to watch on the Internet. Jeremy, that video is insane. It took a while to figure out what was going on, and I was pretty convinced that the dancing blobs were an animation for a while, but I don’t think they were. Rod, didn’t you make something sort of similar a few years ago? Almost exactly like what Hunter was saying could be done with that paper plate—what is that called?
Matt, check the goodwill— also I have one if you want to visit. Come by bike. When I showed the machine to Elizabeth she told me about an artist who makes drawings on the subway the same way you were talking about. Neither of us can come up with his (her?) name through. But I thought it was cool that both of you thought of something like that.
Cool drawing machines Silvie, I hadn’t seen those. I wonder about how planned they are. I like when the very systematic grid like part reaches the more chaotic cloud-like areas.
For those of you who are curious, the machine I made is REALLY simple. I took a motor out of an electric razor that has an off balanced weight at the end of the shaft. The motor is connected to a momentary switch—meaning that I could give it pulses of current as Rod suggested by just pushing the button briefly. I threaded the motor’s weight through a loop at the end of a straight and rigid piece of wire, so that when the motor spins the weight hits against the wire and shakes it. That piece of wire is held in place on the machine by two eyehooks drilled into the wood. Then one edge of the paper is taped to the wire. If you look at the beginning of the first video you can see it along the top edge. The motor itself is allowed some freedom of movement when the machine is running because it is not clamped down to the wood—just attached by its lead wires (red and black, you can see them in the video). Some of the wiring is hidden in the wood, but everything else is visible.
The motion may not be technically “random” but it is relatively unpredictable and hard to control. I’ve done tests where I put material in the same place to start, and it usually goes in a different direction each time. Either way, the tool allows me to add elements of chance and unpredictability to the drawings, even though I ultimately shape them by choosing where to put the drawing materials, how long to push the button, and by deciding if and how to continue after the materials have fallen off of the drawing surface.
Thank you all again, later dudes
-Cara
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