Category: aesthetics

111 Articles
plots, plotters

I’ve been revamping and refactoring the software stack for plotty… pewty… gondola plotty… etchy? bot. Everytime a new riff on drawing machines came up, I’d grab the last code I worked on and tailored it for the new endeavor, often adding generalizable improvements along the way, but never taking the time to refactor previous work.

I always try to be helpful when people reach out on this blog about something they need/want/would like, but I have limited time and I’ve learned to filter a bit and not let other people’s projects take too much of my time. Last December though, the folks from Code Club Luxembourg got in touch with a few questions, and I gave them the usual “helpful but not too much” filter. Except they went on to build 5 PlottyBots, a whole integration with Scratch, and now use it to teach coding. Music to my ears, and clearly they meant business. And so we hopped on a call to exchange ideas.

Clearly the software could use consistency and so I started thinking holistically with the laser code. Each machine has slightly different motor control, but it’s now evident which software pieces are consistent across implementations. Ideally, I’d like the same software stack no matter which machine you happen to be running on. So I refactored back to the gondola plotter, and finally the tabletop one. It’s still not finished but it’s definitely better and more consistent.

To test new software on the original PlottyBot, I ran it on my reMarkable tablet.

I’m not going to do a whole post dedicated to its merits, I’m allergic to promotional content, but I will say a quick few things on this unrelated post. I’ve been interested in Eink for the longest time but never found a compelling device I felt was more than a temporary gimmick. Even getting a pricy reMarkable was a bit of an experiment that could land in a closet gathering dust. But I did want to experiment with quieter and purpose targeted devices so I went on with it after more than a decade of seeing various Eink devices go by. I haven’t adopted it for everything I want to yet, it takes time to change long established work habits, but I will say that it absolutely NAILS writing. It nails it so hard it changed the way I problem solve to an earlier saner process. It might be a generational thing, but writing is key to information absorption and processing for me. The problem with paper is that I have pieces flying everywhere, and mistakes make for an unclean train of thought committed to paper which is frustrating to engage with further. With Eink writing, you get an infinite canvas, and the ability to massage thoughts into a perfect form, one ripe for implementation. I have found that I will pick this device with a sense of relief as it means I’m about to engage in uninterrupted deep thinking. I find many signs that it was carefully designed to be such a device and not your next fancy tech gizmo, and I absolutely love it for this. Hopping on a computer on the other hand does not yield a sense of relief, but rather stressed anticipation at the onslaught of mechanisms devised to get in the way of what I was trying to do. Of course, I can’t do as much on the reMarkable, but I’m curious more than ever to shift to it whatever I can.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
aesthetics, electronics, I.T., plotters

I have yet to crack the math, I’ve been banging my head against the wall with various implementations but this is a lot worse than the Gondola’s double polar system. I’d like the laser to be able to project a cartesian system in any position relative to the surface it’s drawing on. Alas, I’ve only been able to get decent results in ideal positions.

plots

This one is very abstract except when viewed from a good distance it comes together.

plots

I often contact artists to see if they’d like to do something public on the big plotter, and I’m often met with silence :). Sometimes though, I meet the rare characters who are completely fine doing something cool just because it’s cool, new, and takes their art in another dimension, oh and by the way there’s $0 to be made for either of us. I appreciate disinterested people, and Irish artist Patrick Boullier is such a person. He kindly provided a high resolution scan of his amazing piece: Runestone of Memory so I could try to turn that into penstrokes for the giant plotter. After several trials and help from Vectorizer.ai (top of the line for SVG tracing), I got somewhere we both felt was good, and so it ran on the big plotter for a week.

As is routine, the public reveal was preceded by several smaller scale trials.

This is an awesome piece on Norse mythology riddled with symbolism. I highly recommend reading the explanation of some of it (scroll down some).

aesthetics, plots

It was a great plot up until the massive cross-hatch of doom that was the black layer which took days and didn’t particularly enhance anything. Maybe it should start with black paper.

aesthetics, plots

I was introduced to the art form of Découpage. It’s simply one where cuts are made in paper or other mediums to represent a scene. A niche of this art form is the “Poya” representing alpine life, often depicting transhumance. I had this on my radar for a while as I figured it would make for some good plotting material and it does that to a decent extent.

The more interesting part however, is the artform’s unique property of always having material connected. Which means it’s perfect for laser cutting, and for playing with shadows.

In its rightful place

I unfortunately didn’t take good pictures of my trials, I attempted to fill the gaps in epoxy which was a disaster. There is definitely more to explore, and I will further delve into it in due time.

aesthetics, plots

This is the culmination of my collaboration with Lara Laubert. It turns out that Majestic Cat was only a preliminary test for this piece.

Each of Lara’s pen stroke was processed to be outlined and hatched so they would have enough visual weight on such a large scale. The basic “traveling salesman” algorithm I implemented doesn’t discriminate between outlines and hatches, so parts of the drawing look nonsensical until they all come together at the end.

I occasionally would stay near to machine to watch people’s reaction and had a few chats with them too. It’s a real pleasure to see how well received it was. When I took it down 3 students were curious about what I was going to do with the drawing so I offered it to them. It completely made their day and I couldn’t think of a better thing to happen for this drawing.

As always there were several trials and refinements before the public render.

aesthetics, plots

I forgot where I saw this done, but I was finally able to produce something close. The subject is only visible from a distance, getting close quickly dissolves it into something dizzying to look at.

aesthetics, plots

Mandala/Tessellations by Hava Edelstein (as always :)).

Large plastering of UV ink, it looks awesome in person.

I’ve refined my algorithms for processing multiple colors.

I’ve got my next 2 big plots lined up, but I’ll abstain from revealing their test renders until their full size reveal, likely this Fall. Both are collaborations with artists.

aesthetics, agriculture

Flowers started rolling in, one of Nicole’s most successful crops. After many failed attempts, we finally have an established patch of Lilies of the Valley. It’s incredible how far we can smell it from.

aesthetics, plots

I’ve gotten in touch with Lara Laubert through MandalaGaba when she reported a bug about it. Thank god for bugs, because she’s an extremely talented artist from Brazil, and has great enthusiasm for random cool projects. Inevitably when the big plotter was built, I reached out to see if she’d like to collaborate on getting her art rendered by it, and being the cool person that she is, she was willing to launch into it. I won’t link to her social media, because they’re all walled, I don’t have accounts, and I don’t want to refer to them but she is easily Googlable (something I soon won’t say either seeing as they have been taking steps away from their “don’t be evil” moto, but let’s not turn this into a state of the Internet discussion). Lara is an amazing artist greatly skilled in capturing the natural world. I would say there’s a gift in there too, but I don’t want to take away from the work she must have had to put in to develop her skills.

An so through much back and forth, Majestic Cat was born.

I don’t do much more than run some algorithms and operate the machine, but there’s still a lot of work involved. Including many trials before the public reveal: 6 days in a public place where her art to be drawn by the plotter. I did this to coincide with a public event and it was wonderful to see people’s reactions to it.

There was a slight misalignment about 2/3rd of the way in as was made evident at the return to origin. You wouldn’t really know it’s there unless you looked carefully. I believe someone must have bumped into it at some point and that’s ok, I know it’s a bit of a gamble with many people (and kids) stopping by to see it. Maybe it was an actual issue with the plotter, but I never saw this in thousands of hours of plotting.

I’ve been practicing with a laser, and so of course I lasered Majestic cat. It looks awesome.

From the many trials before the public installation, we have Majestic Cats all over the house now.

And the best part is, this is only our first checkpoint to make sure we could work with each other’s format requirements. Majestic cat is a fraction of something bigger.

aesthetics, wood

I always leave a little something in the stumps of the trees I take. It can’t be too complicated, and curves are reeeeeally hard. They’re all over the place and the kids love finding them, I hope the grand kids will too.

aesthetics, building, miscellaneous

The house is still very unfinished 8½ years in, but it’s also gotten to be incredibly cozy during the cold months. It’s only ever gotten better over the years, while we slowly forgot what a regular house is like. I know we crave wood heat when we go somewhere it’s not used. We just bought a new stove, a real fancy clean burning one and I’m very much looking forward to using it although it’ll be likely at the end of Winter that we finally get it. To get a clean air tax incentive we were asked for a propane bill or electric bill, they’ll have to do without, things are too perfect where they are. It is putting it mildly to say that we were shaped by our living arrangements, in many ways I feel like the transformation we sought years ago is complete.

aesthetics, plots

It finished, 5 days total, looks awesome. Now I need to figure out what to do with such a big canvas, I don’t have a wall big enough for it at home.

With this successful test behind, I pause for a bit until the place becomes busier in the fall. I’ll try various experiments then.

plots

3 Days of uninterrupted work, it probably needs 2 more. Things have been going well so far, I’m starting to believe it’ll finish without a hitch. I’m swapping pens strategically so they don’t run out.

The cool software I used for this one yields cool artifacts when it renders.

aesthetics, plots

Some of the mechanical imprecisions of the machine come out on such a plastering of strokes, it’s got a good presence in a room nonetheless.

aesthetics, plots

That one took several attempts and finally completed after ~40 hours. I wrote a way to have the plotter resume after power off to enable very long plots. The enormous deployment I’m working on will require it.

I’ve done a few other portraits over the Winter. Of my kids of course 🙂 They’re great subjects and I like to see them try to guess who’s on a nascent drawing.

plots

I’ve been playing with sharpies on transparent paper. I’d like to make some sort of layered color deconstructible portrait with a sheet for each color overlapping each other. I failed today because of an alignment issue, but I stuck the black layer on a window. It’s very discreet and barely visible in the room, and once you notice it’s enough to see who’s on the portrait. I thought the kids might notice and would get a kick out of it.

Later the sun hit our faces so we lowered the window blind, and it hit me what this whole transparency thing was going to be all about. The reverse projection really makes it pop out. With color layers it’ll be amazing. I like the idea of something that’s barely there most of the time and pops out only with a particular alignment of the Sun.

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