Call and Response - Lines
I spent two weeks in the winter building a small machine.
It is a machine with three motors, three drive screw rotary axes, and a motion controller – it is most simply something that can move precisely in three dimensions and is controlled by numbers.
I wanted it to be quieter and think a little bit more like I did – in overlapping lines that turn on each other, rather than in excavating loops that get to the bottom of things. So, I gave it a pencil, and we are learning to draw together.
G-code to draw a small rectangle
Definitions: Tools, Instruments, and Machines
This machine lies somewhere on the spectrum between a collaborator and a tool – so maybe it is more accurately named an instrument. It has its own internal hierarchy, parts, and logic, but requires a player (partner) to make noise. It expands upon an intermediary step between input and output, and this is where it can exert its own influence. If we then define tools as prosthetic extensions – our pencils, rulers, compasses – then an instrument can use them too, but only with some sort of planning or human intervention. A “machine,” rather, could do this on its own.
Notes on Precision
Lucia Allais writes that the line itself is a tool of precision, foiled by the existence of fuzzy, material, rendered shadows (Allais, pg 4). Yet, lines are a medium, just like oil paint or clay, that relies on a steady hand, measurements, and tools.
Apparently, this distinction has been made since the 1400s, when Leon Battista Alberti defined delineation as the essence of architectural design, and “set the stage for a ‘loss of embodied experience’ from architecture as the sciences increasingly encroached on design. In his story, the line replaced a good kind of mathematics (symbolic, poetic, metaphysical) with a bad geometricization of space (flat, secular, technological).” (Allais, pg 5)
Lines in 16-17th century France were a cult – the French Academy’s theory of dessin reduced depicted objects to geometric regularity to pursue “compositional unity” and even in three dimensions, objects were treated as volumetric shaped with enclosing edges (lines). (Moore, pg 1)
In a flat, secular, technologically infatuated present, how do we design with symbols, poetics, and the metaphysical?
When lines have come to represent scientific legitimacy, how do we also use precision and measurement in a way that it doesn’t mean exactness, completion, or truth?
I am looking for workflows that operate precisely, as a means to build richness and focus on the craft of machine drawing that is shared between two rendering hands (artist and instrument). Shared handiwork and instrumentalization of the digital can diffuse the binary of drawing for experience vs explanation. This project attempts to influence the digital and use the grain/slippage of our instruments to see lines as both material and enclosure.
Allais, Lucia, “RENDERING: On Experience and Experiments.” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, edited by Zeynep Çelik, and John May, 1-44. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvtv938x.
Moore, Richard A. “Academic ‘Dessin’ Theory in France after the Reorganization of 1863.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 36, no. 3 (1977): 145–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/989053.
Overlapping hatches to draw a rectangular hole in the ground
Line collage drawn on Tiny-Z, bedroom window and arched form