Last week Victor Brunetti posted some tantalizing imagery to his blog as part of a brief blurb on the Vehicle Motion Drawings of Tim Knowles. Knowles is an artist based in London with a penchant for creating generative systems to record motion and mark the passage of time. He's worked with the postal service, balloons, insect flight paths and the movement of trees to create unique process pieces that sit slightly left of centre to what we might conventionally refer to as drawing machines. Over the course of the last decade, Knowles has jury-rigged a number of cars into drawing devices equipped with a gantry and stylus that records the forces experienced within the vehicle. In Knowles own words "a system of sliding rails and elastic holds a pen on to paper... as you break the pen moves forward, you turn left the pen moves right". The above photograph documents the installation of one of these rigs in the trunk of a Jaguar E-Type.

The Vehicle Motion Drawings have explored a variety of factors related to driving which include topography and landscape, allusions to cinema and large format output where a drive to the gallery yields the work to be displayed. Perhaps the most interesting of these experiments is evidenced in the above Monaco Grand Prix Track Drawing (2001), which records the force and gesture of racing. The display of the work reveals its genius as the "recording" of a drive is hung alongside a much tinier plan of the track - you can read the exercise at both macro and micro scales but the emphasis is clearly on subjective experience. Knowles' Vehicle Motion Drawings capture the linearity and curvature of auto culture and cartographic delineation and suggests a middle ground between these realms.