The above contraption is the prototype that my team produced at the Hacking as a Way of Knowing workshop this weekend. I collaborated with Gabby Resch, Paula Gardner and Ana Viseu and in the course of 12 hours and fueled by some 36 cups of coffee we built the device pictured above. The assemblage is intended to function as a drawing machine and was constructed in the following sequence.

• taking a turntable and removing the tonearm
• removing the gantries from two cheap printers
• stripping down the cartridge and print head assemblies to "essentialize" the gantries leaving just the moving parts we wanted and the power sources
• building a jig to hold the gantries approximately 2.5" over the platter
• building stylus devices out of solenoids and the nibs of pencil crayons and attaching them to the gantry [there is a photograph of this oddball detail here]

The idea was that this device would act as a "news seismograph" and make marks on a spinning canvas when certain keywords showed up in two custom RSS feeds (built in Yahoo Pipes). Each stylus would begin the day on the same edge of the platter and over the course of 24 hours incrementally creep to the opposite side. This drawing machine would map the frequency of two contrasting keywords (such as pandemic and containment) culled from feeds that aggregated dozens of major media outlets and information sources. When a desired keyword appeared in one of our feeds the solenoid on the appropriate gantry would be triggered and drop the stylus to the canvas for a half second. Each of the two keywords would be articulated as a distinct colour.

This is a simple "test print" that we did when we demoed the device. At 33 1/3 RPM the canvas would rotate approximately 48,000 times in 24 hours and at the end of a day you'd have a 12" as output. What kind of distribution patterns might emerge over the course of a complete news cycle? We can only really speculate at this point as our electronics didn't work but given the fact we had such a limited amount of time (and waffled so much) we're content with the rough prototype we developed. I now have the two printer gantries sitting on my desk and I plan on trying to develop this workflow further and hopefully generate a more tangible proof of concept.

I documented our project in a photo set on flickr and in examining those images it is clear that the linear evolution of the work that I presented at the beginning of this post is quite simplified. We didn't go into this project with any kind of thesis or mandate, but instead went looking inside junk for inspiration. We gutted four printers, and several other devices and put together an inventory of possibility. All of our thinking emerged from what was on the table in front of us and we built narratives based on the moving parts, assemblies or electronics components that we happened across - it was a lot of fun. Thanks to William J. Turkel and Edward Jones-Imhotep for the invitation to participate. Keep your eyes trained on the workshop wiki as documentation from the various projects will undoubtedly be posted there in the near future.