This page presents highlights of generative plotter artworks produced in Golan Levin's Fall 2021 Drawing with Machines course at Carnegie Mellon University. Key links include:
- The official (Wordpress) course web page is here. The fall 2021 syllabus is here.
- Additional and higher-resolution images can also be found in this Flickr album.
- The notes below were originally published in this Twitter thread.
One of the first prompts was to "write code to create a family of (hatched) blobs". Works shown here are by Sarah Di, Leah Minsky, Jean Cho, and Aren Davey.
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Additional responses by Angie Bonilla (who created a generative comic strip), and Himalini Gururaj:
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..And BCSA student Nik Diamant made this "blob family" animation using the EMSL AxiDraw and a FlipBooKit:
... while BFA sophomore Rick Zhang developed this generative "blob family" inspired by the pocket watches of Salvador Dalí's "Persistence of Memory".
Afterwards, my students had a Truchet tiling project. Here are AxiDraw plots by Shiva Peri, Hima Gururaj, Jean Cho, and Evan Tipping. Jean Cho, for example, used noise fields to create structured Truchet patterns, and then purposefully interrupted the plotter when it felt done.
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Art+Engineering student Perry Naseck discovered that our HP7475A supports an HPGL command to make filled wedges (...presumably, for pie charts). His pattern is exclusively made of them, and uses fluorescent & metallic inks.
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BCSA student Aren Davey blew everyone away with these stunning tilesets, plotted on her own machine.
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Possibly the most surprising tiling project last week was this wholesome orgy by BCSA senior Nik Diamant. The Truchet tile modules are generatively-arranged heads that kiss their neighbors. Nik hand-colored "islands" of connected friends.
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Benford Krummenacher, a 3rd year BSA student, used non-alphanumeric Hershey font glyphs to construct tiling patterns for the cardigans of generatively-designed people...who were rendered on our 30" MH871-MK2 drum plotter. Benford explained that these life-size plots were intended for the purpose of making a party seem more crowded.
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In our course, BCSA 3rd-year student Angie Bonilla made a Truchet tile stopframe animation governed by a cellular automaton. Here are some of her frames, plotted on the AxiDraw....
...and one of Angie's plotted animations:
At 3am at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry last night, Nik Diamant busted robodoodles with EasyWhip:
Tomorrow is a big crit in my class. Aren Davey is making a blisteringly good revision of her Truchet piece:
...and Architecture+HCI 5th-year student, Lukas Hermann is working on a visualization of his text message history.
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In this eight-foot drawing, Lukas visualized the timeline of the 30,000 text messages he exchanged with his friend Connie. The line angles upwards if he sent a message, and points down if Connie sent a reply.
Shiva Peri (ab)used GIS software to generate offset curves from a squiggly hair…
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Second-year BFA student Leah Minsky used a differential growth algorithm in Processing to govern the path of an EMSL AxiDraw. Then she created uncannily similar diptychs of seemingly improvised brushwork.
Engineering student Evan Tipping explored psychedelic circle packings in blobby forms.
Art+Engineering 3rd-year Perry Naseck has become unusually good friends with the HP7475a, even learning to repair it. Here, he used it to plot frames of a fluid simulation, with fluorescent inks, and also explored densely overlapping colors.
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Engineering sophomore Shenai Chan generated interactive (physical) Truchet tiles, which she engraved with a laser cutter and hand-colored.
3rd-year BCSA student, Hima Gururaj, continued refining her algorithmic body-part tiling system, based on the Wang Tile algorithm. After conversion to HPGL, she executed it on the MHK871 30” plotter/cutter.
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Jamaal (Mali) Tribune, a graduate student in the MSCD Computational Design program, executed rule-based drawings using the knitting machinery in CMU’s Algorithmic Textiles lab.
Angie Bonilla is developing graphic novels in an unusual hybrid process. She generates reaction-diffusion and other algorithmic patterns, and plots them with an AxiDraw; she then uses these marks to structure and inspire her own hand-drawings over top.
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Aren Davey made numerous test swatches to precisely tune the proportions of her revised Truchet tile plot. Algorithm fans may recognize just a hint of (x^y)%9 rhythms in the mix.
Benford is now creating computationally-generated party-planning floor mats in order to algorithmically orchestrate social interactions. Plotted with the MH871-MK2 cutter.
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Final project documentation is pouring in from my Fall 2021 "Drawing with Machines" course.
This compelling project by 2nd-year BFA student Jean Cho doesn’t quite look like anything I’ve seen before. These remarkable figurations are made in a bespoke "thrice-drawn" workflow that blurs the boundaries of human and machine: 3D forms are hand-drawn by Jean in VR using TiltBrush; projected to 2D and plotted with an AxiDraw; and then hand-overdrawn by Jean with the same pen.
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Angie Bonilla secured a FRFF grant for an EMSL Axidraw plotter, and has been conducting a particularly deep investigation into bespoke algorithmic image treatments and end-to-end generative comic strips.
Angie also gave herself permission to get her actual hand in the work, experimenting with the use of plotted algorithmic textures as a starting point for improvisatory manual over-drawing.
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In this unusual study, Benford Krummenacher used Farneback optical flow to analyze motion patterns in archival films of race cars. They used these vectors to guide the paths of tens of thousands of colored pen marks, rendered by a vintage HP7475A.
Third-year BCSA undergrad Shiva Peri's large-format project depicts a catastrophic collision of thousands of empty office chairs—proxies, perhaps, of lives lost during COVID. Shiva scraped the chair models from online, and arranged them with simulated physics.
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4th-year BCSA undergrad Nik Diamant wrestled with the dragon of creating his own 2D shape intersection library. (It's not as simple as it might sound.) In the course of so doing, he produced generative "debug view" plots like this one.
Here's a detail view. Nik was hitting a lot of NaN's. Racing to produce work for the final exhibition, he decided to display all results, including faulty ones, by whatever means necessary.
Inspired by Étienne-Jules Marey, Lukas Hermann video-recorded each of his classmates walking down the hallway. Using the Detectron2 library, he then produced this series of chronophotographic motion-portraits.
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For some of our experiments, you had to be there. 3rd-year BCSA undergraduate Sarah Di combined Cycling74 Max/MSP and Processing to create an interactive recording system for asemic voice memos.
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Using Google QuickDraw and Markov-driven remixes of her own chat history, second-year Shenai Chan generated imaginary interior scenes and abstract love letters for a series of two-sided postcards.
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Mali Tribune used virtual headforms as an environmental pressure on particle simulations to generate drawings inspired by Murjoni Merriweather and the fiber architectures of African hair.
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For her final project, Hima Gururaj developed custom software that could create generative compositions from her modular hand-drawings — obeying semantic logics in how they were arranged. For example, her software arranged animals eating each other (mouth to tail), and constructions of machinery and plumbing that fit together.
Students finished the semester with a postcard exchange, annotated in this PDF.
