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  • Drawing Machine
  • Robert Twomey (bio)

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Drawing Machine, © 2013 Robert Twomey.

Drawing Machine is the latest in a series of conceptual subtractions from the parameters of drawing as an art act. A precision-controlled CNC device labors in place of the artist, working with unfaltering patience and inhuman precision to fill a sketchbook with images over the course of the exhibition.

This project marries my technical interests in motor control, image vectorization, and machinic spectacle with my history as a painter. Drawing has been my most heartfelt and originally self-defining activity as an artist, but I find it difficult to place the value of drawing in the context of other readily available image-reproduction technologies. A doppelgänger or substitute, this project reintroduces drawing as the output of a laboring machine, raising questions of absence and presence, expression, and the value of the handmade.

The uneasy combination of technical fascination and artistic desire is a recurrent theme throughout my work. In other projects I have reflected on computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition, colliding these techniques with personal content to illuminate essential questions of identity, embodiment, and cognition in our time. [End Page 394]


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Drawing Machine, © 2013 Robert Twomey.

Drawing Machine examines multiple notions of scale. As a mechatronic system, the twin-pulley hanging plotter system is designed to be inherently scalable. The drive belt and modular pulley system can expand the working space of the machine from 14 inches x 17 inches (the size of the sketchbook) to a 12 foot x 20 foot wall, and it can operate with the same sub-millimeter precision across those scales. Beyond these physical qualities, Drawing Machine examines the dynamics of plasticity and material resistance in digital fabrication processes: how the relative ease of transformations in software manifests as time-to-manufacture, duration, and cost when realized in the material world.

In the larger context of my art practice, I wish to achieve some reconciliation of my ambition to vanguard technical explorations with the tradition and history of a studio-based practice. This piece is one incremental excursion in that larger project. [End Page 395]

Robert Twomey

Robert Twomey
University of Washington
rtwomey@u.washington.edu

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