serial consign

Earlier this month, I was semi-inspired by a Dataisnature post on some recent work by Lia. In that post, Paul Prudence contextualized Lia's Isaidif project in relation to some of other great "drawing machines". To add to that list of projects:

First up is The Plotting Machine, a modified wide format printer that can be outfitted with a variety of "print-heads" to produce a variety of imperfect output. The project was developed by You Don't Matter, a design collective comprised of Martin Borst, Sebastian Cremers and Daniel Schludi. The device can be equipped with blades, a variety of styluses, and the trio of designers have even conducted some long exposure photographic experiments with the contraption. The statement for the project outlines some of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the content output on this machine:

Most interesting and inspiring are all the little mistakes this machine produces, because of too much data, too much water, color, pressure etc. There are always gradients because the color gets less and less as the machine draws on. This expansion space describes the machine's actual identity. No Image looks like the other.

Take a look at the gorgeous output that this machine has generated - I'm particularly taken by the watercolor grid drawings.

Secondly, Rob Meek recently produced the above demo video for his Meek FM "typographic synthesizer" [see previous post]. While this device isn't a drawing machine in the conventional sense, the demo clearly illustrates the manner in which this system reads individual letterforms as reconfigurable vectors. The character of these "lines" can be modified and that shapes and modulates the sound travelling along these paths. This project is quite noteworthy in that it creates an interface through the intersection of two distinct disciplines.