Drawing with Machines
In my last semester at CMU, I had the privilege of taking Golan Levin’s course Drawing with Machines. Here is some of my final work from that class.
- Happy Valentines Day
Send a secret love poem! I programmed a canvas where you trace an invisible message out with your cursor, and you can only see it for one second when you finish the message (by clicking down). It creates an SVG that is then sent to a plotter and draws out your message. Your message only reveals itself through the drawing machine!
2. Jiyeon and Allen at Yuba City River
I tried splitting an image into separate color channels, similar to how I would in riso printing. I experimented different hatching shapes, and plotting with color pencil and pen.
3. I ruin everything
The prompt for this assignment was “shape”. (The same way we can tell artists they have a good “sense of color”, what does it mean to have a good “sense of shape”?)
I thought about a shape that was a motif in my life: the text bubble. I wrote a piece of software that allowed you to find any message anywhere — input a larger body of text, and an accompanying message. It will search the larger body for your message, and outline it as a text message. This text bubble is plotted on by a machine.
4. Happy thoughts
I wrote a piece of software where you typed a message in and according to the semantic analysis of the words you were inputting, the message became less and less readable. Starting to type in happier words reverts the type to become more readable.
I also plotted another version using this software in a diary entry style. Pen on oil pastel.
4. We are Infinite
You can infinitely scale and zoom in to an SVG (scalable vector graphic), the file format our plotters read. We think of lines as almost one-dimensional (as opposed to something like a shape, which is volumetric). But in reality, there’s an infinite amount of information in lines — if you look really closely, no line is perfectly a “line”. On screens, lines are made of pixels, with corners poking out. In print, lines are made with ink that interacts with fibers of a paper/fabric.
I wanted to display the beauty of a line, and the experience of looking closely at something for a very long time, and how that makes you feel.
A memory I reached back to: On the first day of AP Lit in my senior year of high school, my teacher assigned us to go somewhere high up and dark that night, and write an essay about “it”. She wanted us to think about the macro. On the second day, she assigned us to just sit down and really take some time looking at our hands, and write another essay about “it”. She wanted us to think about the micro, zoom in to the details in our hands and think about what hands and creation meant.
We as humans have been obsessed with our hands. There is an infinite amount of information in our hands (and prints), something that we’ve been born with and will always have with us. I wanted to provoke the rituals that we’ve had since the beginning of time — staring into our hands and trying to find answers. I wanted to provoke that we already and always have the answers to all the questions we may ever have, and that we take them around with us everywhere.
Through several rounds of deconstruction and reconstruction, I scanned my own finger prints and hand prints, converted the skeleton into lines, and plotted them on 24"x36" paper. Similar to my very first exercise in this class, the art was only truly revealed by the machine.
I am so grateful and happy to have taken this course. Golan’s method of teaching creative coding healed my relationship with software. Taking a drawing course gave me the chance to be fully and only an artist (as opposed to bringing an artistic perspective into other practices). Being around Golan has inspired me to want to teach more and give back.
