The Bernard&Anne Spitzer
School of Architecture
SSA Robotics Lab
Robotic Calligraphy
Dong Wen
This is a series of collaborative projects by human and the robot, exploring the relationship between randomness among intentions. Robot is playing the role that produce constant output, with predictable movements and higher level of accuracy. Me, as human, is playing the role that mainly learn, observe and make decisions. The factor that most stable and predictable is the movement of the robot. In both drawing and lighting project, I used other elements to against the consistency and accuracy and explore the balance. With the constant and repetitive drawing movements, variables in materiality produce different outcome.
For phase one, I made decision to use soft brush as a medium to express the movement of the robot, for it is super sensitive to the variables, such as forces, speed, titled angle and the ink. All the tiny changes will be reflected and exaggerate through the pattern of the strokes drawn by the robot. To let the two-dimensional drawing tells a three-dimensional story. What I did is to observe and adjust variable for the next experiment.
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I tested with the simplest form, the straight lines. Even with the simplest lines repetitively drawn, the outcome was more complex than I expected. I had to repeat the process scientifically to learn the visualized interactions. Judgements were made by myself when accident happened, such as the drops of the ink or the traces of collisions. But these incidents were not disasters, they just move the story towards more possibilities. This is how randomness influences the development.
