[ drawing machine ]

Benjamin Forster – Drawing Machine (Output = Plotter), 2009

Benjamin Forster’s Drawing Machine project can be summarised as an investigation of drawing using a specific system-based methodology. This project has two concurrent aims: firstly to explore ideas about drawing, and secondly to raise questions about the authority of reason and logic as methods of understanding.

This is not an investigation of any specific style of drawing, but simply drawing as the act of making marks on a surface; how these marks are made in relation to one another and, most importantly, what knowledge is necessary in order to make such marks. This investigation centres around his attempt to program a computer to draw in a way that is distinctly human, rather than stylistically digital or mechanistic. It is important that his program simulates the human characteristics of drawing because it is exactly the human quality of drawing that he has been attempting to understand. Benjamin believes it is only through comparison and contrast to human drawing that his machine’s drawings reflect the inadequacy of systems to capture the infinite detail of the world.

Step 1: Look at my own drawings.
Step 2: Formulate formal procedures that encapsulate
++++++my ideas about drawing.
Step 3: Express formal procedures in computer code.
Step 4: Compare the resulting machine drawings with
++++++ my own drawings.
Step 5: If machine drawings = my drawings then STOP,
++++++else continue to step 6.
Step 6: Refine formal procedures.
Step 7: Goto step 3.

Note: This machine will never produce the same drawing twice.