Weekly Project: Drawing Machines

Create an image that combines the hand-made and the use of a tool/machine. We will look especially favorably on assignments that make use of non-digital tools or machines. One way to go about this is to create your own “drawing machine.” Here are a few relatively low-tech examples that you can build at home, which you are free to use for this assignment:

1. Create a version of Alberti’s Veil, the 15th-century tool for perspectival drawing. Read more and see some examples here. To create this you’ll need some way of creating a gridded surface and looking through it. You could use a wooden or cardboard frame and some string, or use dry-erase marker to draw a grid on your window, or find a window that already has small, squarish panes.

2. Make a pantograph, a 19th-century tool for copying drawings. Depending on the size of your pantograph, you can use it to scale drawings up or down.

3. Make a camera obscura, a Renaissance tool for creating images from pinhole or lens-based projections.

4. Take inspiration from (or recreate an example of) Sol Le Witt, the conceptual artist whose Wall Drawings each outlined set of rigid, set-in-stone rules for creating a series of lines. Then, he, and a series of friends and assistants, repeatedly carried out each Wall Drawing “recipe” in varied circumstances. In the case of the Wall Drawings, he argued that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” See an example of how to create a specific Le Witt drawings here. You can also create your own rules, such as, “take a photo of a building and draw a line between every corner and every other corner you see,” or something equally crazy. (Note that your professor has written a bit about Le Witt’s drawings as machines.)

For this assignment, we ask you not to use AI text-to-image generators.

Upload a picture of your machine, a picture of the image you made, and a reflection of 200-ish words. Give an explanation of how you made your image and how it explores the tension between hand and machine; describe how the process relates to any of the readings, lecture content, or your discussions with other students.

Your written reflection is as important as your artistic creativity, so don’t worry if your image is “bad” or if your idea is half-baked. Just try something!