Pablo Garcia

A Brief History of Drawing Machines

The door to a prominent 20th century art movement had closed. Unknown to the artists in Europe, a similar drawing experiment was ushering a new line of inquiry. In 1957, Akira Kanayama, member of the Japanese Gutai Art Movement, used an electronic toy car to paint on canvases. Like Tinguely, Kanayama was exploring the removal of the artist’s intentions in the production of work, interrogating the role of authorship in his machine-forward art. But unlike Tinguely’s mechanical machines, Kanayama’s electronic devices resonated with a new generation of artists who sought performative works that had a more pronounced engagement with technology. If Tinguely’s works were the end of the early 20th century’s art movements, Kanayama’s technological explorations would inspire the emergence of art and technology practices that still flourish today. 

The history of drawing machines is a complex taxonomy. For nearly six centuries, humans have collaborated with machines to put pencil to paper across hundreds of artistic and scientific disciplines. Until the invention of photography in the 19th century, if one wanted to convey visual information, a human had to draw it. And at least since the early Renaissance, people have employed mechanical systems to help them draw. 

The artists in Tracing the Line insist on maintaining this centuries-old collaboration between humans and machines. They work computationally, but the plotter – a machine that drags a physical stylus across a surface to make marks – is a vital, analogue step in this work. Viewing the works in this volume, one can see the connections to the 20th-century history outlined above. We are all children of the Etch A Sketch, CalComp plotter, and the 1950s art canon. But I also see traces of fantastic, forgotten machines from centuries past.

1525: Underweysung der Messung 
As I write this, we are merely two years away from the 500th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer’s Underweyssung Der Messung. Among the most reproduced images from this massive treatise are Dürer’s depictions of drawing instruments to assist in making accurate perspectives. There’s a man drawing a reclining female through a gridded screen. There’s a lute being drawn by two men, using a string and a hinged door.

Dürer’s images depict in fine detail what artists had known for nearly 100 years. To draw more accurately from life, follow the rules of linear perspective described by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435. In On Painting, Alberti relays the mathematics of constructing images with depth, a system first devised and tested by his friend Filippo Brunelleschi years earlier. This was the first Renaissance treatise on linear perspective, and Alberti spends many pages tediously describing the geometry behind the method. At the book’s end, he admits to his reader that there is a simpler path. He notes that an easy way to understand perspective is to imagine a thin veil between you and your subject “so the visual pyramid penetrates through the thinness of the veil". Alberti then outlines how to actually construct a veil with grid lines that will assist the artist in delineating a view. This is, in effect, the first drawing machine. 

The Renaissance preoccupation with verisimilitude dominated drawing technology for generations. Most treatises on drawing focused on improved formulas for constructing linear perspective. Many of those included descriptions of machines that were either practical tools for drawing or didactic demonstrations of perspectival principles. Drawing machines, for nearly two centuries, existed as technologies to apply mathematical concepts in pursuit of art. 

1608: The Pantograph
The idea is simple. Take four thin, equal lengths of wood and pin them at the corners so they pivot. This quadrilateral can be pulled and rotated to form infinite parallelograms. Pin one corner to your table. Attach a pen to the far vertex, and a pointer to the one in the middle. If you hold the pointer and trace a shape, the pen will simultaneously draw the same shape, but at an increased scale. Change the connection points in your parallelogram and change the enlargement ratio. Switch the pointer and pen and make reductions.  

The drawing machine now has a new purpose. Instead of facilitating the translation of real life to paper, this machine makes copies. It is the birth of the pen plotter. For centuries after Jesuit priest and astronomer Christoph Scheiner described his magnificent invention, the pantograph was applied to every corner of media arts. Even into the early 20th century, pantographs would be essential gear for making image enlargements and reductions. Because of its ability to reproduce images in various scales and formats, the pantograph is a key player in the rise of mass media. 

1752: Plotting Curves, Plotting Space
In a perfect marriage of plotter and linear perspective, mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert invents a machine capable of drawing mathematically-precise perspectives by tracing the lines of a figure as seen from overhead. In his perspectograph, you place the plan of a figure under the extended arms of the machine. As you drag the pointer to follow the X-Y path of the figure’s edges, the linkages above draw the perspectival view of that shape. This ingenious mechanical plotter embeds the complex mathematics of linear perspective and generates spatially-accurate views from an architectural plan or city map.

In the same year a very different plotter emerges. Italian mathematician Giambattista Suardi, creates the Geometric Pen, designed to generate roulette geometry – curves generated by points rolling and rotating along other curves. The gears on the machine are in various ratios, causing the pen to roll and rotate at constantly varying rates. If you’re having trouble visualising this, just think about the Spirograph you owned as a child. While Suardi’s mechanism is more complex than a series of plastic gears, the geometric principle is the same: overlapping curves that produce, through repetition, intricately drawn patterns.

1800s: Science-o-graphs!
The story of the 1800s is one of media transformation. The invention of photography in the 1840s forced artists to reconsider previous frameworks of verisimilitude. Photography becomes the ultimate imaging technology, pushing perspective drawing machines into obsolescence. During that century, the application of drawing machines transformed. The Renaissance paradigm of science aiding the production of art is inverted. Science began to employ art in the increasingly sophisticated technology of  measuring nature. The drawing machines of the 19th century were data visualisers. Sensors that measure weather, bodily functions, geological events, and physical forces all had one thing in common: their data output was a drawing. 

This explosion of sensory equipment that record and store data heralded a new era for drawing machines. Drawing was now semi-automated thanks to sensors that react to invisible stimuli and translate directly, in real time, to paper. This new drawing machine boom was marked by the proliferation of devices that, perhaps to sound scientific, nearly always used the suffix “graph” in their name to denote “a machine that draws” the specific phenomenon. So, in the 19th century, you could peruse a scientific or mathematical instrument catalogue and see the sphygmograph, cardiograph, barograph, hygrograph, thermograph, seismograph, magnetograph, ergograph, chronograph, integraph, coordinatograph, conchoidograph, ellipsograph, helicograph, pendulograph, and harmonograph. And if you simply knew the prefix meaning, you would know the machine’s data visualisation capabilities. 

Many of these devices remained unchanged well into the 20th century. Ever wonder what that drawing machine is in the corner of your local art museum’s exhibition space? It has a little needle with a pen scoring a line on a rotating drum. Every museum in the world has a thermohygrograph, and it measures temperature (thermo-) and humidity (hygro-) values that could damage fragile artworks on display. 

Tracing the Line
The instinct to label contemporary works using pen plotters “quaint” or “retrograde” is understandable. The digital age has consumed us entirely, and physical media – especially slow, deliberate methods like plotting lines – can seem positively ancient in comparison. But the works here are not merely the result of an antiquarian impulse or archeological curiosity. Using drawing machines today, even while digital images are our currency, is deeply human. We have collaborated with machines to draw for six centuries. Computers are mere infants in this time scale; it will take time to see how digital sentience will learn to draw. Until then, humans and machines still have work to do, ideas to explore, and drawings to make. We’ve been together for 600 years. The works in this book are the descendants of this long line of drawing machines, and the prelude to the next 600 years of human-machine relationships.