One of my students who is doing her thesis on mechanical Chance methods has produced some really interesting automatic drawings built by little 'robots' that she has constructed herself. The robots are essentially moving machinery with an attached open pen that draws along the path that the robot decides to take. There are many features that I find extremely interesting in this project. The line itself is built from tiny little dots that immediately make it clear that the drawing has not been constructed by a human but by a machine. The lines themselves incorporate this very digital aesthetic, almost like a Processing sketch. This creates a cool contrast between the clearly traditional medium and the digital outline.
Aside from the technical details however, I find that there could be an interesting argument about the authorship of the drawing. Of course the idea behind the process is Sarah's, but technically she is not doing any of the drawing herself. Is the robot the artist? Can one comment on the beauty of the composition of the piece when it was created by a mindlessly roaming robot? Can Sarah take credit for a drawing that took three hours to create, during which, she was baking cookies instead? The answer is of course, yes, because it was her concept all along, however the fact that the drawing looks so good in the end does get one wondering about the beauty of randomness and chance, and how the formal elements are still present in every sense even with such lack of control.
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