The Dialogue between Drawing Machines & Human Ambience

Design Team | Xu Zhang + Hyun Seong Min + Siwei Ren + Brandon Kang
Exhibition Year | 2015

+ Taubman College ASRG Winner 2015 RGB Gallery
+ featured in Dimensions 29 publication
+ Video Courtesy of Robby Kim




The Dialogue between Drawing Machines + Human Ambience explores the dichotomy and synthesis of the interaction between programmed movement and human interaction through automated and sensory technology. The research focuses on the development of machines that generate drawings collecting the surrounding information of the place and time. Using sensors such as light, vibration, sound, and object sensors, the machines react and alter its path and form of motion based on the contextual ambience. This collection of information about a specific place is translated into the drawing, hence making this drawing device an artifact that stores the memory of that place. Although the machine is scripted and programmed in such a way to have a base path, a default, the human interaction and context allows the drawing to accumulate with ink which starts to dissolve a perfect drawing and celebrates the amorphousness of the drawing, in other words, sloppy precision. The next steps of the research after the exhibition is to decode the drawings by studying the motion, density, forms of what the machines have produced based on different spaces in time. As much as this project is about the exploration of the dichotomy of machine and man, it goes beyond that simple idea and hopes to flirt with the concepts of recording space, drawing that space, and decoding the drawing of the space.




All works © TKTN 2021.