Well, I took that device, and fabricated using a Wen scroll saw and Dremel tool and some experimentation a set of handles to drive the syringe actuators, to be able to more smoothly control the drawing motion. I’m calling them ohara style controllers because I think the will-scarlet >> scarlett-ohara semantic bridge made some sort of intuitive sense, with shades of thematic connection maybe to… flying and O’Hare International Airport? I don’t know – I only work here. I’m just making this shit up on the fly, and trying to keep it all straight in my head.
The ohara controllers anyway came out great, you can see the video sample of the motion and some other images over on this Imgur gallery. Here’s a closeup of the controllers – hopefully Butlerian Jihad-safe:
I finished this very version 1 initial prototype of a robotic drawing arm made from willow branches from my garden, and using syringe hydraulic actuators (no electronics or motors). Terrible picture again, sorry. One day, I’ll do some better quality photos of all these things.
This is one style of a SCARA arm used in robotics, where the S and C stand for selective and compliance, in that it can move horizontally in xy axes, but not vertically in z. In this case, the movement is provided via a human operator pulling and pushing the water-filled syringes and tubing to actuate the joints of each arm segment. (Here’s some related concept art I did for this using AI before/during the actual build.)
I spoke about this and some of my other low tech human drawing bots (or “biobots“) in this episode of the Silicon Synapse show. I’m trying to find that mystical crack in the world between human-whatever and AI-whatever where something stops being a human-ish thing, and becomes a “mere mechanical process” such that it becomes according to the bureaucratic gods who deem it their role to interpret such omens… UNCOPYRIGHTABLE!!!
I, of course, have a lot more to say on these topics, but am trying to document at least minimally some of the highways and byways that I have traversed this past year while investigating these issues creatively. I’ll also do a demo drawing with this machine in the coming days and post that here.
Unfortunately, this initial design is pretty limited in its range of motion, which is okay because I was more just trying to understand how the mechanisms work, and now I have something adequate to experiment with which I think will be able to tell me through experimentation proper dimensions and alignment for an updated version with a greater range of motion.
Biobots is the latest name I have come up with to house the art explorations I am doing around building IRL drawing machines of the low tech and human (or nature) powered variety.
The first one I did used a little motor and battery. The second was a pulley system rigged up to control a gondola with a marker taped onto it to be able to drawing lines on the wall. It worked, but imprecisely. This is my third iteration, tentatively titled “Gondolier” since that word describes the human oar-bearer who directs the flow of action on the river.
Apologies for the shitty photos, but I have a small studio space:
So the device functions by the user standing in the middle, and rotating the wood dials clockwise or counter-clockwise. The dials are glued to toothed timing pulleys, which engage with a mating toothed timing belt. So as each dial turns independently or manually synchronized, it causes the gondola to move around (itself weighted with batteries), and an acrylic paint marker is duct-taped to the bottom.
Here is the close up of the v2 version of the dial-pulley mechanisms:
Wood dowels are 8mm, as are the bores of the timing pulleys, so they had to be filed down and sanded out a little to allow for free spinning. There was a failed earlier prototype of this I won’t go into, but suffice it to say having good quality dials securely connected to the pulleys is essential to having this be a fun and fluid experience to use.
An early stage of the initial test:
While I think the motorized and electronic controlled wall plotter stuff is interesting, I’ve learned something about myself, that I don’t enjoy tinkering with coding stuff (Arduino, etc) more than absolute minimum, but I love tinkering with physical stuff.
So my theory behind all this is, why not take things that are commonly robotic, and sort of rip out the robot part, and replace it with a human processor, a human being? In effect, a biobot?
Turns out, of course, like everything, that “biobot” is a term already in common use, but it’s meaning is incredible, and strangely complementary thematically to the ideaspace I am trying to explore with this series. I blogged about them previously as xenobots & anthrobots, but biobots also speak to this “third state” that is supposedly emergent for some kinds of cells in some conditions after the death of the host organism. Popular Mechanics quote:
Unlike some cells such as tumors or organoids that continually divide after death, these xenobots took on new behaviors beyond their biological roles. Studies have also found this ability in human lung cells, creating anthrobots capable of self-assembling and moving around.
I think this makes “biobiots” an acceptable area of overlap thematically with the project I’m undertaking (Freudian slip), in that it speaks to breaking the duality between accepted positions of “life” versus “death” or “good” versus “bad” or “human” versus “technology,” and moving beyond all that to a third state where new behaviors and ways of being become possible, self-assembling, and autonomously moving around and having this new kind of life which serves purposes we’re only just beginning to understand.
This was an important solution, a hole drilled through the dowels once they were mounted on the wall to prevent the dial-pulley assembling from traveling off the dowel. Then a nail slotted in holds it in place:
It might not be evident in these pictures (or in person) what’s going on with the plastic bags, but they contain dead batteries as weights, where it actually ended up being easy to find three sets of approximately the same weight batteries to put into each bag as resistance and into the gondola itself.
In future versions, I will cuteify those into some other form (maybe small vertical willow baskets?), but for this solidly working prototype, it’s “good enough.”
Here’s the first finished painting in this series, all done entirely using the Gondolier drawing device and paint markers taped to the bottom.
I’m really excited about the level of control I could get out of it after some initial experimentation and learning. I haven’t processed my videos yet, but the motion is very smooth and satisfying to use. It could probably be “better” somehow but there’s a lot of experimenting left to do here to know in which specific directions to take it next to find its best form. It’s wonderful and raw feeling right now though just like this in person. A video won’t express that anyway.
The only current drawback is that the dials are mounted fairly high up, above shoulder level, and somewhat far apart. I’m still adjusting as to what is actually the maximum usable drawing space, and the relative dimensions of the arrangement, this is just what presented itself in the moment. After a few hours of playing with it though, it’s absolutely tiring to use with your arms up in the air for a long time. In shorter stints (an hour or 2 maybe) it is highly usable and enjoyable.
I found my next project last night in the biobots series, a combination of these two, a syringe-driven hydraulic robotic arm, but as a SCARA arm capable of drawing on a table. So the control system from the first video used to replace the electronics and motor in the second:
I also happened to finally fall down the Theo Jansen Strandbeest rabbit hole last night while investigating mechanical linkages, and this video interview of him is the best one I’ve seen so far. The Strandbeests totally seem to be “biobots” to me, as they have behaviors of their own, powered by natural forces (wind) and responding to different kinds of stimulus, like walking into the ocean, or bumping into something with its feeler. Incredible:
The only thing I don’t like about these is they are made of plastic, but having seen his method for assembling them using heat to form custom joints, I can see why it is desirable for his application. I’m left wondering though, what kinds of biobots could be made out of locally-grown willow branches?
The last bit that has been on my mind here is thinking about “robots” that might pass through the legendary Butlerian Jihad of the Dune universe, where all thinking machines were destroyed and outlawed, to be replaced by human calculators, mentats, etc. And how these biobotic “robots” I’m exploring seem like they could pass by without arousing the ire of the Butlerian Jihad authorities… plus, these kinds of devices would survive an EMP blast, since they have no electronics at all.
Interestingly, as I was writing this, I asked ChatGPT for the relevant quotes from Dune’s Orange Catholic Bible, which I believe to be canonically is:
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
However, ChatGPT then came up with its own plausible other quote:
“Man’s flesh is his own; the maker has given it form, and man’s spirit is free.”
Totally non-canonical, but fits the style and themes to some degree. As I understand it, Herbert didn’t leave us the complete text of the Orange Catholic Bible, so… you never know! Also this neatly illustrates why we might not actually want to over-rely on thinking machines either…
