2010

In these plotter drawings two systems of representation are contrasted: mimesis, wherein the form of the representation is derived through a process of imitation; and synthesis, wherein the form is derived by a process of virtual ontogenesis -- that is the form is made in a way analogous to the process of growth in the referent.

The constraints of drawing with an antiquated plotter include the difficulty of drawing anything but straight lines. So to represent photographic images took some creativity. This software draws random lines in a density inversely proportionate to the light density of each area in the photograph.

The multiplication of trees, a forest makes.

The first drawing algorithm I tried, after writing a java driver for my HP7475 plotter, was a recursive tree algorithm. These simple figures based on repeated uniform bifurcations produce almost perfect fractal structures. They are varied by changing the ratio of the left and right branches, the thickness of subsequent branches, etc.

State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2010. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use.