Homebound 001: A live two-hour plot
Hey all! Early last month I had the opportunity to bring my plotter to an art fair and plot live. The overall theme of the fair was "place" and my work was part of the programming In Care of Unfinished Places, which featured local artists doing their thing at Mana Contemporary.
How I tapped into place was through home by asking people what's something specific that reminds them of home. What I love about pen plotting and generative art is that no two pieces are the same. Why this is extra special, to me at least, is that everyone's responses are unique; adding another layer into the mix. I cannot make something like this without people. It's their human responses filtered through various algorithms/software and ultimately brought to life by a machine holding a pen. I may be rambling now but it's a process that I find so beautiful.
Back on track, people sent in their responses through text, pictures, voice memos, or by leaving a voicemail. The core of the work relies on waveforms. For voice memos and voicemails, it's easy enough to extrapolate that. For text responses, I fed them through a text-to-speech bot to get waveforms. All waveforms I fed through waveformer (a tool by misha.studio, huge shoutout) to get SVG files of the waveforms. For images, they were passed through drawingbotv3.
Why waveforms? I really just wanted a way to get lines. The waveforms are unique to each person and give me a set of lines I can work with. Lines are then either filtered out based off size, offset, lofted, rotated around a point, spread across a 2D field randomly, turned into circles based off their length, rotated around a central point in 3D where noise is then added, etc.
The plot consists of 34 pens and 20 interpretations of what home means to people; deconstructed, abstracted, juxtaposed. It took just under two hours to plot and is on 11"x14" white 120lb paper. Pens used include gelly roll, muji, paper mate, stabilo, staedtler, and uniball.
This is hopefully just the start of an ongoing series in collaboration with itsdense. If you found this interesting and would like to participate, call 551-220-2368 to leave a voicemail or text something specific that feels like home to you.
For possible future pieces, I'd love to explore different abstract forms of representation or lean into one or two from the piece above and see what the output can be.
Last pic of the bunch are business cards I made using scraps and drafts :)