Category: aesthetics

112 Articles
aesthetics, all out geekery, electronics, plots, plotters

I had a chance to run 2 Pewtybots at a public event where people could have their picture taken to be turned into line art to be rendered by lasers. I should have taken better pictures and videos, but I was too busy manning the station and talking to people. It’s unfortunate because it’s hard to convey the experience with words.

Ever since the first successful prototype, I kind of knew I wanted to do something for this event. And so I built 2 machines, refined the software, the math… well maybe that’ll be another post… I’m not sure I have it right just yet, I might. I have it right enough at least, let’s just say I refined the math. Finally, I spent time developing and practicing a pipeline where I can take someone’s picture and send it to either Pewtybot happens to be idle.

Esther helped man the station so we practiced at home with all her toys pretending to be the various personalities she’d encounter at such an event. From the overly curious bear to the llama in a hurry. And so the pipeline is as such: first we take your picture. A monitor is facing you to see what it is.

Then we turn that into lines to be drawn (or lasered in this case). This is supposed to be a first taste of eye candy as these algorithms are cool to see at work.

Then you go in a dark room, and see it all get zapped on the wall (I don’t have a picture of the lasered dog plush).

Because this was a first on many fronts, I was pretty anxious some things would go wrong (they did). I also didn’t know how to present it, or how people would react. So the first couple of “customers” helped me figure out how to guide them through the pipeline. And when the time comes to go in the dark room, I purposefully kind of dump people in there and vaguely tell them to wait for the wall to light up. I have the laser write their name and count down from 3 to 1, and then the laser moves much faster through their portrait.

Nicole quickly realized adding chairs in the dark room would invite people to take in the experience more. And I realized I was silly to tune my setting for single portraits, I almost exclusively had families and groups of friends in the same picture. The reactions were great, although I didn’t get any from inside the room, people coming out were full of questions and kids were smiling. As always with my silly projects, there’s also a smaller fraction of people with whom they resonate more deeply.

Overall it was a big success and pretty smooth for a first. I want to do more for sure. There’s something fireworksy about when the laser really starts moving and light shows up everywhere.

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.

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