A pen-plotted drawing of a Qing Chinese vase standing on a tiled floor, inside an illusionary frame.
Drawings with a machine · 2019 to 2021

MAD — Machine Aided Drawings

When
2019 to 2021
Made with
An AxiDraw pen plotter
Media
Ink on paper
Subject
A Qing vase, a tiled floor, and the frame around them

Drawings and tiles created in collaboration with a drawing machine.

Six drawings of a Qing Chinese vase on a tiled floor with illusionary frames. They were all made with an AxiDraw, and each one came out different: while the machine worked I moved the paper, or the pen holder, under it.

So the plotter is not a printer here. It holds one half of the drawing and I hold the other, and what lands on the page is whatever the two of us do to each other.

The machine drawing

The AxiDraw at work, with the paper moving under it.

The six vases
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Playing with the image frame and space
Inspired by M. C. Escher, Another World
Inspired by Sebastiano Serlio, Vredeman de Vries and Giovanni Bracelli

The mathematisation of visual representation: the moment European drawing decided space could be built out of rules, and the treatises that worked out how.

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Where it belongs

Ethnomathematics & Ethnocomputing

A machine following rules to make an image is the same argument as the Sona drawings and the perspective treatises: geometry as a way of thinking, not a way of measuring.

The thread ⇢

All the art ⇢