Category: 03-PlotterSkimming

One of the main themes I observed in the readings was that of experimentation as a key in creating dynamic plotter art. Last week, sweetcorn brought up a really good point in class about the tendency of plotter art to look a specific way (mathematical or realistic), and this was something that I kept in mind while reading the blog posts. 

I really appreciated Licia He’s blog post in particular, because I think she emphasized the materiality of plotter art in a way that keeps me doubting it is plotter art in the first place. It also makes me consider human intervention as part of the creative process, because of the variations, colors that exist in her work. Her notes on the different papers and mediums she uses the works she chose to convey help broaden my perspective of what I think plotter art is.

I also thought that Matt Deslauriers’s run-through of the “patchwork algorithm” and other space-filling/recursive patterns was really nice, it makes me want to create it and then find ways to ruin it.

Lastly, it was cool to hear there is an Inkscape Axidraw extension.

Having little exposure to plotters, I find myself constantly surprised with every new thing I learn; so while this may seem trivial, I was surprised by the diversity in the art outputted by Licia He during her multiple 100-day drawing challenges. It was interesting to see the differences in style when she leaned more into using clean, precise lines vs more organic and natural-looking lines. This is inspiring for me because the more geometrical plotter drawings to me sometimes seem devoid of personality, so seeing the more chaotic drawings was intriguing.

I have tried and failed to plot with a pencil before, so Tyler Hobbs’ “9 Tips to Execute Generative Art with a Plotter” was very helpful to me. I think there’s something special about the pencil because of its role in early education. I remember my school did not allow us to use a pen until 6th grade and I remember feeling so frustrated by the dullness of pencils and the flimsiness of mechanical pencils and the smell of pencil sharpeners and them spilling all over the floor.