drawing

Speak, Pen is a web-based art tool programmed in JavaScript. It’s a drawing tool that replaces the traditional paintbrush with custom text inputs. Users are free to use text on the canvas to make visual poetries, interactive drawings, and performances, etc. The work explores the materiality of text, and ways in which users experiment with texts beyond their semantic functions.

Created during a radical tool workshop at SFPC, Speak, Pen takes inspiration from other “radical” tools that encourage DIY spirit and playfulness. It is not just a digital drawing tool, but rather, a community that aims to inspire makers to experiment with texts beyond their daily functions. It is something that can be performed, alone, or alongside others. I intend to blur the lines between users and the creators or mediators of a platform. Our community guidelines are based not on rules for how to use the text brush, but examples of how past audiences have experimented with it. The meaning of the works lies not within the interpretation of the texts in the drawings, but the different engagements with the tool within and outside its community.

(Source: ELO 2021)

A. Bill Miller's 'Gridworks' is an ongoing body of work that includes drawings, collage, video and transmedia compositions of text-based characters.

"We exist within a built environment that is constantly mediated by the grid. Grids organize space through coordinate mapping and patterns of development. Grids compress, redisplay, and reorder information. Grids are an enforcement system imposed upon both nature and culture.

Grids can also be populated with marks that are fundamentally human — the characters of our shared alphabets. These marks — once scratched by hand, now recorded by a keypress — are not simply carriers of meaning but iconic forms in their own right. The codes of information interchange can potentially become an artist’s palette, a medium for drawing. The coldness and rationality of the grid confronts the warmth and playfulness of the human touch."

[Screening] Rules that order the reading of clouds’, 2016 is a screen-based work that explores the process of constructing meaning using line. According to Laurent Jenny, the intention of the artist/writer Henri Michaux’s early graphic work was ‘to reconcile writing and drawing, which after all are both attributes of the same line.’ In this new work, the medium for Sally Morfill’s and Ana Čavić’s dialogue is the nomadic line that traverses visual and literary fields as it moves between drawing and poetry. Our starting point is a single digitised sketch selected from a series of quickly executed line drawings of a landscape with clouds. The image is gradually deconstructed and recomposed as a poem, then in turn, the poem is deconstructed and reconfigured as a drawing, emulating the movements of clouds. We set in motion a call and response between drawing and writing, as each new configuration of lines, conjuring new meanings, emphasisesthe fluidity of communication.

Source: ELO Conference 2017.

Poetracking is a work of digital literature created by three students respectively studying graphic design, digital technologies and journalism. It was developed during the Erasmus intensive program “Digital Literature” organised by Philippe Bootz and held in Madrid in 2014. Poetracking's homepage encourages you to draw a tree within the interface by using a simple drawing software, providing built-in tools such as colour and line width. Shortly after your drawing is finished, a poem appears on the screen. Then, after a while, the poem disappears and you are redirected to a database in which all previous drawings and poems are stored, including your newly generated poem. As innocent and simple as it may look, this project draws in fact from the Baum personality test (sometimes called tree test) created by psychoanalyst Charles Koch, which is meant to bring out a patient's main personality traits and emotions by analysing the way he or she represents a tree on a sheet of paper. By closely examining the drawing, its shape, its position on the white blank space, its colours and the thickness of its lines, as well as some characteristic elements of the tree itself, the psychologist is able to get information on the patient's behaviour and his/her relationship with others. For instance, small trunks symbolize introversion and low self-esteem, while large trunks imply strength, higher self-esteem and vitality. In several respects, however, Poetracking misappropriates the original Baum test. By not providing any context or explanation, it twists the actions of the user who unknowingly generates a poem based on the analysis of his/her personality. This result is generated by simultaneously comparing the three tools that have been used (colours, line width and position on the page), all of which are linked to keywords through a combinatory process. But the profiling process no longer is accurate, since the Baum test parameters are reduced to three only. Since the parameters are oversimplified, the Baum test ends up misappropriated and much more minimalistic in the way data is treated, since the drawing is no longer analysed and interpreted extensively. Therefore, the profile given to the patient is reduced to just a few keywords. By highlighting the weaknesses of the Baum test, Poetracking was designed to point out how subjective it can be. By keeping all previously generated profiles in a database and making them available to all users, Poetracking also aims at denouncing tracking systems which analyse our tastes and preferences and try profiling every aspect of our life while we're browsing the internet or using our smartphone. The software is unable to completely track the user's intentions, which gives it another dimension: he or she could decide to ignore the rules and draw anything but a tree, thus being free to experiment with the software and bring out all its poetic potential.

A Certain Slant of Light, Typographically Speaking is a blog post that chronicles the process of creating a piece of electronic literature from prompt to product. The project took the Emily Dickinson poem “There’s a certain slant of light…” and rearranged the words into a drawing, inspired by the poem. What makes this piece of electronic literature especially interesting is that this is my first attempt at e-lit! I documented the discovery process on my blog Some Science in a nod to the digital humanities; to show how using electronic tools creatively can produce and inspire art. (Source: Gallery of E-Literature: First Encounters)

Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks, the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group communities have teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named TEMPTONE. Tempt1 was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes. The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.

My work involves making marks with a rhythmical distribution of signs on a surface. Not just drawing on a surface but also physically changing it.

The work 2 sides/2 lados is a mixture of drawing, laser cut, wall drawing and book art. Passing from one technique/material to another the invented script undergoes transformation. The initial drawn script is digitally manipulated and cut from the paper to leave voids – the marks appear by their absence. The same marks are then transferred manually to a corner wall.

My current practice is concerned with finding a way of synthesizing the duality generated by site-specific works to produce work which involves a site-specific element and a broader element, but whose elements are integral – there no longer being an original and a copy or a site-specific version and a documentary version. Each is part of the work in its entirely – yet each is independent.

This visual work could be seen as a kind of visual poem, scroll drawing, or webcomic strip. Seemingly the result of tracing or drawing by hand on thin paper, the piece has two layers of drawing: one layer is presented at the beginning of the piece for a few seconds before it fades into an opacity that mimics ink shining through from the other side of thin caliper paper. To add complexity, the work seems to be created on a long strip exposed to view partially through a scrolling mechanism we cannot control and which goes by at a rate that is challenging to keep up with. Zellen acknowledges this desire for control by pausing the scrolling just for a moment and briefly bringing up the word “pause” before continuing the rapidly scheduled presentation of the work.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)