MAD — Machine Aided Drawings
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 AxiDraw at work, with the paper moving under it.
The machine drawing in white ink on black paper: an arcade, a tiled floor, the vase, and its shadow. Then up close, where every surface turns out to be made of the pen’s passes.
The mathematisation of visual representation: the moment European drawing decided space could be built out of rules, and the treatises that worked out how.
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.