machine

March 5, 2010

Drawing Machine at Southern Exposure Monster Drawing Rally

I participated in the Monster Drawing Rally put on by community arts and education oganization Southern Exposure as a fundraiser. 100 artists drew live for an hour and they sell the results. I used an 80's era pen plotter to do my drawings. I had written a java driver for the HP7475 and created a number of sketches based on a recursive tree algorithm.

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Plotter Drawings

Working in software has made me particularly interested in the fetishization of the artist's hand. That is why a drawing machine is a particularly attractive output device. It mediates the gesture of the hand drawn and the machinic world of software which is most often present to us now as the bloodless surface of a screen.

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January 1, 2009

Published in Vague Terrain

My Inscription of the Girly Man piece was published in the online journal Vaugue Terrain this month (January 2009). The journal included my essay "The Language of Machines."

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Inscription of the Girly Man: The Politics of Stupidity in the Age of Intelligent Machines

This set of texts constitute the catalog for the installation "Inscription of the Girly Man." It's essays cover topics which range from language and machines, to the function of material metaphor in art, and finally to the vagaries of contemporary political rhetoric.

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The Language of Machines

There is a language of machines. While we may not know we know it, we do. It is our language too. Our sensitivity to the mechanical gesture confirms our affinities with the inanimate. We are the becoming thing of animality.

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The Micro-Mechanics of Material Metaphor

What started one place ended in another; in between it passed through something.

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Narrative-Body

The explorer seemed to have accepted merely out of politeness the Commandant’s invitation to witness the execution of a soldier condemned to death for disobedience and insulting behavior to a superior. [20]

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Event-Body

The body is not a given–not a whole, finished, and closed container of thought or of substance–but a kind of technical construction, always under construction.

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Flame Hardened Bed

The site of production for Inscription, has a significance beyond some breezy fascination with the "making of" things. The machine shop instantiates a particular machinic aesthetic.

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