Mike P Chatper 1 v1

Over the course of the last year I’ve been making drawings using computer-controlled pen plotters. During my time at the PZI and WDKA I’ve come across several of the machines, and found both the machines and the drawings they produce intriguing. The academy has a number of them that date back to the 1980’s. The manual for the main plotter I’m using has instructions for connecting the plotter to an Apple II computer, which gives an indication of how old the machine is. In spite of their age the machines are robust, reliable and easy to program. You can use some basic commands that tell the machine to either place the pen up or down and move to a specified coordinate.

Plotters have been superseded by printers for nearly all uses, with the exception is for vinyl cutters most commonly used for sign making. The design and operation of both vinyl cutters and pen plotters are essentially the same, only instead of a pen, a knife is moved across the surface of whatever material is loaded into the machine.

What distinguishes images made by a plotter from images made on a printer is that plotter images are built up line by line rather than dot by dot. A printer outputs the image sequentially, left to right, and top to bottom. The output is entirely logical, start at the beginning and finish at the end. Conversely the plotter builds the image in a very inefficient fashion, constantly moving the pen and paper back and forth for each line. Lines are not sorted to minimise travel time, and are output in whatever order they were generated in software. Before the advent of inkjet printing they were one of the only ways of producing highly detailed images on paper.

I wanted to learn how to use the machines, but in order to use them I would first need lines to send the machine. Programming the lines seemed the natural thing to do, as my most recent exposure to plotters was through artists that use computer code and programming to generate their work. My first experiments started with generating random straight lines in a programming environment such as Processing. With 4 lines of code in Processing you could automatically fill up a page with randomly drawn line segments.

From this approach of using straight lines to generate imagery I was able to make a connection to the idea of using triangulated wireframe meshes that are the basis of most 3d models. The most common way that three dimensional shapes are displayed on a computer monitor is by way of triangular meshes, in which each triangle is a straight line connecting point to point. With this approach in 3d graphics the straight line makes up all forms from the rigid and rectilinear to the organic and bulbous. This is a perhaps a mundane observation, but still a necessary starting to point which led me to experiment with translating the work I was doing in 3d into 2d drawings on the plotter.

My first tests were simple 1-to-1 translations of wireframe meshes from 3d characters to drawings of the wireframes on paper. The resulting drawings were rigid and mechanical but they held my interest as they don’t totally function in ways that would expect a drawing should. They had the material qualities of a pen and ink drawing but they read differently as the lines of the wireframe mesh describe the surface morphology in a mathematical way, rather than in the way that human eye would interpret them.

In these tests I attempted to create portrait-like works, using images of the faces of 3d characters. In the 3d models of the characters I was using, the wireframe density varies across the mesh; from sparsely packed in areas such as the cheeks and forehead, and more densely packed near the eyes and mouth. This packing leads darker areas and lighter areas, but the darker and lighter areas correspond to areas of information density rather than areas of actual light and dark (shadow, value, shading). This has the effect of drawing the gaze to these more densely packed regions in the drawings where lines overlap and the ink bleeds. I still found the drawings lacking as the aesthetics of the wireframe meshes leads to readings that are mostly diagrammatic, limiting their appeal.

The approach of using unmodified wireframe meshes as a source for drawings was ultimately abandoned after observations I made while watching the drawings being output by the machine. This process can take several hours for an image to be completely output by the plotter. In that time the plotter will move from the middle of the page, draw a few lines, move to the top of the page draw a single line, move to the bottom left draw a long extended segment of lines and then a cluster of lines nearby. The software sending the lines to the plotter doesn't output them in any readily discernible order, and definitely is not optimised for either logic or efficiency. The result is that image is built up in an almost random fashion. (This is most likely the result of the algorithms used to translate the 3d meshes into 2d drawings)

What I soon discovered was that the images were transformed in unexpected and unpredictable ways in their halfway finished state. While the drawings contained the same information, their source was less immediately apparent. Though they were made up of straight lines, the incomplete meshes almost felt almost gestural, sketchy and hand-made. I wanted to explore further to see if I could find a way of emphasising those qualities, and transform the diagrammatic qualities of the source material and the rigidity of the machinery into something softer and more imperfect.

This led me to experiment with ways of modifying the wireframe meshes to create lines that felt more gestural. Everything was already inside the wireframe meshes, only the information needed to be rearranged. I accomplished this in new plotter drawings by randomising the positions of each of the line segments by a few millimetres, also rotating the segments by a few degrees. By making these changes, a reference to the original form is maintained, but the resulting image is looser, more chaotic. By establishing a set of rules, I could produce a series of variations on these images.

This turns out to not be a novel discovery or approach. In 1967 artist Chales Csuri working alongside programmer and technologist J. Shaffer created an animation of an illustrated hummingbird morphing from a single starting point to a recognisable line drawing and then to a chaotic exploded arrangement of all the constituent line segments moving from full exploded , going from what he describes as “scrambled” to “realistic image” (p. 83). His work was featured in a program of computer animation at the MOMA in New York as well as in the landmark exhibition of computer art Cybernetic Serendipity, which opened at the ICA in London in 1968. In the exhibition catalogue he describes using a process of scattering the lines by means of “up to 6 inches of radial displacement in distance, and plus or minus forty-five degrees in angular displacement […] and let the random number generator decide where the point would fall.” (Reichardt, ed. 1968, p.83) Strikingly, this is nearly the exact same formula that I would apply to my own drawings, some fifty years later.

Charles Csuri trained as a painter but eventually started using computer technology in his work. In an interview in the Cybernetic Serendipity catalogue, Csuri describes his process: “The type of mathematics one can use in, say, doing hand pictures - if you will excuse the expression - is restricted by how much time it takes to solve a problem, that is, normal methods of working are too slow.”

Speed was not the only concern he conisered to the computer as being able to help overcome. The use of computer generated randomness was central to many of the early computer artists work. Csuri descibes his reasoning for using randomness as a way of overcoming personal bias:

“I think when you deal with so-called structures or distortion of points, values, lines, or whatever, that you have a certain bias. This bias is based on past experience, pre-conceptions of what is structure in art, and one way of breaking away from this is to introduce a mathematical system that can’t depend up that kind of conception. This is a way of breaking the bias and perhaps getting to an interpretation that you ordinarily would not think of.” (p. 81)

Unpredictability becomes a factor in the work, (both from the randomness and from the abstraction required from programming with punch cards on the early computers) “You approach this in such a way that is would be impossible to visualise what will happen, and perhaps this is that part that makes it interesting.” (p.83) He differentiates this mathematical method from what he considers “working in conventional terms and could anticipate exactly the result.” (p.83) However, this is not to say that it is an easy process or a guarantee for success. “You’ve got to work hard in order to set the game up so that your output is interesting. You’ve got to set up strategies … there are certain things you can do that would be obvious and quite predictable…” “… it is rather difficult to set up a sophisticated game."(p.83)

Artistic Uses of Plotters and Early Computer Art

While using such antique machines in the creation of my work I was often thinking about how my work would relate to works made by early computer artists working in the late 60’s and in the early 70’s. I was especially interested in the use of plotters as a way of making art objects through technical processes that would result in a “traditional” works on paper. During my initial research I saw the exhibition “Artistes et Robots” at the Grand Palais in Paris, which featured works from a number of artists working with drawing and painting machines, with works spanning from the 1950’s to the present day. In this exhibit I got to see works by Jean Tinguely, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Patric Tresset among many others.

The exhibition featured the works of Jean Tinguely, whose mechanical drawing machines could be seen as a precursor to works created by early computer artists. Starting in 1954 Tinguely created a series of drawing machines called Méta-Matiques. The drawings produced by Méta-matiques were the result of mechanics, using electric motors, irregularly rotating parts, linkages, springs and angular motion to produce chaotic and unpredictable results. The drawing machines were often interactive, allowing the spectator (in the original presentation, not in current exhibitions) to change the speed of the electric motors that drive the machines, altering the outcome of the drawing. The machines are designed with the expectation that outcomes are never the same and can therefore produce an infinite number of outcomes.In the 1959 Biennale de Paris, his Meta-matique #17 produced over 40,000 drawings. The material and mechanical affordances for randomness are present in the mechanical design of the drawing machines and these features account for the variation in outcomes.

Manfred Mohr was an early pioneer of computer art and produced the majority of his work by means of a plotter. Unlike Tinguely the machines used by Mohr are expected to operate in the same way each time (within a small margin of error). It is the programming not the machinery that produces the variation in outcome in Mohr’s work. In that regard if one of Mohr's programs is run in the same way, the machine should output the same work. The same could not be reasonably expected from some of Tinguely’s drawing machines. In Mohr’s work, the role of chaos and randomness is shifted to the next order of abstraction; from physical, material and mechanical, to conceptual, digital, and programmatic.

Also featured in the exhibition were works by Vera Molnar, using similar techniques. Her drawings on printer paper with sprocket holes, grids on repeated boxes, undergoing a transformation, becoming more and more unrecognisable, chaotic, random.This piece works on this same order of abstraction.

A human being working in a procedural manner, as in the work of Sol Lewitt, is still executing a program. The likelihood that they would execute the same work in the exact same way twice is fairly small. The question is how faithfully will the person executing the work follow the instructions. Their bodies might betray them, they might perform differently, depending how much they ate, slept drank etc. Their hands might shake as they get tired. Their arms get stiff, constricting their movement. Their minds might wander and adjust their interpretation of the instructions. The might not read the instructions correctly, or not want to follow the instructions. Both their physical capabilities and their intellectual will could conspire to shift the work off-course from the original intention. This is a built in affordance of the original program, designed by Lewitt. The variability of outcome privileges the conceptual framework, the instructions as the central locus of the work. “The idea is the machine that makes the art.”

A more contemporary example of drawing machines in the exhibition was by Patric Tresset in his installation “ Human Study #2.d, La Grande Vanité au renard.” The focus and concerns of Tresset's work are significantly different than the more modernist concerns of his computer art predcessors. The installation uses dramatic staging, putting the machines making the drawings on display and showing the drawings in the process of being made during the exhibition. The installation features three desks on which are mounted anthropomorphic drawing arms, comprised of servo motor linkages articulated like jointed human arms, sketching out a still life vanitas scene. Each desk also has an articulated webcam that can switch from looking at the drawing on the desk to the still life scene in front of it, suggesting a visual feedback loop. Tresset states that theatricality is a central concern in his works.

Some of the finished drawings are shown in a grid arrangment on the adjoining gallery wall. The drawings are even signed, with the name of the robot Paul rather than the artist himself. Tresset has produced multiple iterations of this installation, with varying numbers of robot arms, sketching different scenes from still lives to live models. The installations are usually designed in a way that they look like drawing classes at an art academy.

On Tresset's website he states that he designed the robots in order to overcome a serious case of painter's block. The website also states the drawing tehcniques used by the robots are based on the artist's own drawing technique but that "Even if the way Paul draws is based on Tresset’s technique, its style is not a pastiche of Tresset’s, but rather an interpretation influenced by the robot’s characteristics"

While not featured in the exhibition, one other contemporary example of an artist using similar drawing machines is Sougwen Chung. Where Tresset’s works are theatrical, Chung creates works that are performative, combining marks made with her own hand with those made by machine. In her series “Drawing Operations” she uses robotic arms similar to Tresset’s, and uses them to create work which she describes as “an ongoing collaboration between an artist and a robotic arm.” Like Tresset, Chung has given her robot a human-like name: D.O.U.G._L.A.S.

In "Drawing Operations" the artist and machine work together simultaneously in a feedback loop creating abstract marks on the same piece of paper, reacting to the generatively produced drawings and making her own additions and modifications by hand. While Tresset's installations use robots as a stand-in or replacement for the artist, in Chung's works the robots are always featured alongside the artist drawing in concert with the machines. The documentation of the work, the photographs of the artist and robot together seem almost more important than the final drawings. As the projet has evolved, the robots have increased in size from small table-top drawing arms to massive industrial robot arms in increasingly theatrical fashion.

Unfinished Notes

Would the images created by these artists stand on their own, without the foregrounding of the technology and the process ? By using an older machine, does this move it further to the background, making it less of a focus ?

There is a fractal recursiveness to the directions in which these histories act as impulses for the work and get applied in the imagery being made. Are these machines trying to recreate things that have been made in the past? How do these things get changed when made by these processes? Where are you giving up control and where are you regaining it? Where do you fit in these historical lineages ?

What are the functions of these qualities: the programmatic, the procedural, generativity, randomness, repeatability, human fallibility, control, errors, communication, translation errors?

These claims go back quite a ways, with Aaron, the quote unquote AI painter.

A. Michael Noll - A Subjective comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with lines’ 1917 In cybernetic serendipity - Includes user testing to see if they could discern between the computer picture and the Mondrian, also they preferred the computer picture to the Mondian (p. 74)

I’m struck by the fact that I’m reproducing the exact same steps that an artist had undertaken half a century ago. They were working with punch card machines, the programming was much more of a challenge but the fundamental of the process are essentially the same. Now the files that I working with often test the limits of the computer hardware that I’m working with

Prosthesis

The drawing act as way of bypassing the limits of my own body.

What elements do I have control over What elements do I not have control over, make it clear what elements are not in my control)

“Donald Judd, for example, employed mathematical calculations or principles of seriality rather than subjective judgments when creating his sculptural form. Empirical in nature, his process sought to obviate signs of personal decision by making mathematical sequence correspond with compositional arrangement. “ When the machine made art(p.58)

Using the human form complicates this arrangement ?