Cookies UI

machine

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.

March, 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.

March, 2010

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."

January, 2009

Flame Hardened Bed

Flame Hardened Bed: bits

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.

June, 2005

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.

The Micro-Mechanics of Material Metaphor

A computer-controlled machine carves the surfaces of 150 pound, cubic foot, blocks of concrete with its hammer drill. Each block is lifted onto the machine in turn and held inside its mechanism. The drill moves in a path across the block’s surface and laboriously traces out the words “girly man” in various configurations. The marked blocks stand on one side of the machine while the intact blocks lie in wait at its other side. A wall separates the controlling computer from the machine and the blocks.

Narrative-Body

Kafka’s story, “In the Penal Colony”, reverses the narrative of a technological intervention which, in the sphere of justice, renders discourse moot. The explorer in this tale happens upon the penal colony on the day of the last use of an infernal machine–on the day of its destruction and the death of its last remaining proponent. This ironic and perverse inversion acts to emphasize the cruelty of the dawning of an age where a synthesis of bureaucratic method and mechanical execution conspire to radically redefine the meaning and function of not just justice, but of the faculty of judgment itself.

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.