I’ve gotten interested in this recurring criticism on social media of my work with gen AI, that by using these tools I’m “not a real artist.” So I’ve been looking at other new and interesting ways I could provoke that same criticism, all while thoroughly expressing my not-real-artistness.

I landed on a simple first experiment after looking for videos of drawing machines and robots on YouTube. We made this one at home from a spare battery pack, a motor I pulled from a broken toy bubble gun, markers, etc. When the alligator clip gets connected, current flows, and the bot hops and bobbles around on account of the motor’s attached weight being off-kilter. Video here on Imgur, I can’t seem to embed it into this WordPress install.

The doodle bot outputs can look something like this:

This one contains traces from several successive runs of the machine on the same paper, and here’s another on some scrap that was previously marked up with black paint, as depicted in the linked video:

I could easily imagine more developed experiments in this direction which, combined with maybe other painting techniques, and using some acrylic paint pens instead of felt-tip markers might actually result in some pretty compelling finished works.

But are they copyrightable? This is another common concern people seem to have in reaction to my work with AI. I tend to follow conceptually the UK copyright framing, as described here:

Computer-generated works

The UK is one of only a handful of countries to protect works generated by a computer where there is no human creator. The “author” of a “computer-generated work” (CGW) is defined as “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken”. Protection lasts for 50 years from the date the work is made.

For my money, that’s the most rational and reasonable policy regarding copyright for computer-generated works, and it’s quite divergent from how the US Copyright Office is currently handling these matters.

In poking around for historic antecedents of drawing machines, I came across some cool work by the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, whose work in “méta-matics” is depicted here in this short 1959 British Pathé video:

Tinguely’s work is too deep to really go fully into in this blog post, but here’s another video to give further context:

Worthy of more exploration another time. It’s cool that he was also concerned with the poetry of the machines and their actions and relations themselves, in addition to this ability he sometimes experimented with, of having them output drawings as records of their erratic motions.

Of course there is Harold Cohen, whose work I briefly went into recently here. The interesting thing about his work is that it was an attempt at a rules-based AI, not statistics-based like today’s gen AI. So he hard-coded all these physical relationships and proportions of the human body, so that his machines and software could autonomously generate consistent and aesthetically pleasing visual artifacts.

Sougwen Chung is also integrating more sophisticated drawing robots into her work, as I went into a little bit here.

Another prominent and more recent example I found in this space are the drawing machines of Harvey Moon, which are captured in this video from 12 years ago:

That video depicts a wall plotter, which also goes by the name of polargraph, and many other names for more or less the same thing, a motorized mechanism connected to software which can shuttle around a marking device against a drawing surface on a wall or panel.

There are tons of tutorials about how to build one of these things, and control it usually with Arduino to trace out shapes defined in graphics software. I thought this one by Liz Melchor was one of the better ones. If you pop over to this animated gif on their site, you can see one of those things in actions, complete with counter-weights on each side.

It occurred to me somewhere along the way though, couldn’t I build something like this but without any motors or software? Essentially a “human-powered” extremely low-tech drawing “robot.” So I built one in my basement with some rope, pulleys, part of a plastic bottle with some coins in it as a gondola, and voila (click through for a short video of it in action, not able to embed here):

Here’s a schematic I did that is a reconfigured version of the polargraph schematic originally found here.

My version replaces the motors in top right corners with simple pulleys, and the counter-weights with another set of pulleys below to be able to operate the mechanism from a few feet back.

This is obviously a quick and crude prototype, but it tells me that with some tinkering and refinement, there is some interesting territory here to be carved out. I couldn’t really find anyone else who was doing anything like a manual wall-plotter.

I’ve realized about myself after all these years that, even if I can occasionally pop in and get some small bits of code working, I’m really not a “coder” and I don’t enjoy getting bogged down in trouble-shooting Arduino, etc. So the idea of simply side-stepping all the high-tech elements and subverting them with low-budget low-tech alternatives powered by human “elbow-grease” sounds really appealing to me. I worked for years as a stage technician, so this kind of simple rigging to perform an action in the moment makes a lot of sense to me.

I did have someone on Reddit point out that a large scale manual wall plotter could also essentially be a large wall-size Etch-a-Sketch which would be really amazing to have. This video shows what those devices look like inside, how they work, and offer a crude attempt at duplicating the mechanism:

The Etch-A-Sketch Wikipedia page has an excellent diagram of the pulleys and rigging inside the machine and a verbal explanation, which I’ll include below for fun to show how it shares many elements we might see in a CNC plotter:

I’m planning to build one of these to the dimensions of my experimental wall, but in the meantime, it’s interesting to see in my first tests of the basic prototype above that certain kinds of movements are easy to pull off, and certain are more difficult, and it has everything to do with the points of control and the methods of their functioning.

In my survey of this landscape, I also found an excellent site dedicated to various types of historical drawing machines. One of the more common of these that are easy to find on YouTube is the harmonograph, consisting of anywhere usually from two to four pendulums. This one has three:

I’m planning to build one of these under a piece of furniture I made recently to do a test. It will be a variation of this design:

Am I a “real artist” yet or not? I can’t even tell anymore. I think the question *might* just be meaningless…

There’s another direction to explore in the purely mechanical drawing methods, that of using irregularly shaped cams which correspond to repeatable drawn patterns, as can be somewhat seen in this two videos from Aaron Kramer:

That looks like a really fun and interesting and time-consuming thing to get into… Putting that on the list. Another video about something similar with 3d printed cams by Takuto Takahashi:

This Carnegie Mellon University Design video has some other interesting random drawing machines of many different types:

And an interesting paper entitled A Brief Overview on the Evolution of Drawing Machines, which includes a nice set of base criteria for what might constitute a drawing machine in the first place:

  1. A drawing machine can be an autonomous or semi-autonomous machine. This can be a set of human-powered gears or mechanical linkages that automatically generates an image through a machine-held stylus.
  2. A drawing machine must control—or help a user control—a stylus, a pointy object that leaves a mark or line on a surface when applied pressure: pen, quill, pencil, airbrush, or more recently capacitive tips for touchscreens.
  3. When used to draw from life, a drawing machine inserts itself into the stylus-hand-eye circuit. As the artist holds a stylus in her hand, whose movements are coordinated by eye, the drawing machine can guide the eye, or control the stylus, or augment the hand.

Maybe there are other criteria I’d like to explore in this “latent space” but those seem like good jumping off points for further exploration.

Speaking of human-powered machines, I felt it also might be relevant to get briefly into automatism or automatic drawing, especially as pioneered by the Surrealists. Perhaps it could be said that they were trying to turn their bodies into robots which could express the hidden non-verbal commands of the subconscious mind through them as mechanism. Lots more to think about here!

Related writing & research