rodcorp

Underground train drawing 2

There are 75+ of these now (see earlier set) - drawn on the Northern, Central, District and Piccadilly lines - a small proportion of the total station-to-station journeys on the tube network. These give a feel for the visual range in results so far (and we haven't even got to the roller-coaster that is the North-western end of the Metropolitan line):

• Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Circus (sitting, direction of travel to left)
• West Brompton to Earl's Court (sitting, direction of travel to left)
• Hammersmith to Acton Town (sitting, direction of travel to left). This one is an equivalent, except for changes in the train's motion, to 5 superimposed drawings from the District line.
• Euston to Mornington Crescent (sitting, direction of travel to left)
• Mornington Crescent to Camden Town (sitting, direction of travel to left)
• Camden Town to Kentish Town (sitting, direction of travel to left). Compare to the first which was completely different, though done standing up.

Update, 9 Jan 04: here's Witold Riedel, an excellent artist/illustrator, on the affect of the subway train on the drawings he makes (in an interview in the Morning News) :

The movement of the subway can be like a giant invisible hand that just pulls and pushes everything and everybody around. Drawing in such an environment is like trying to keep the pen steady during a mild earthquake, or when there are turbulences on a flight. Imagine trying to draw anything fairly small on a packed train that runs on the express track between 96th and 72nd street, or what happens in the shakiest last car of a subway going from a dark tunnel onto the elevated tracks. We are traveling at high speeds, on metal wheels, on metal tracks, through an environment that is under the surface of Manhattan.

There can be a lot of people in the car, a constant shaking, a rocking motion, acceleration, deceleration, the train stops to refresh its cargo and the cycle starts over again. The movement of the car helps to add very unpredictable distracters and disturbances into the drawings, which could probably count as mistakes, but I try to include them in the process.

I have to admit, though, that some elements are added when the train is in the station, or even at my desk, far away from any large moving means of transportation.

Future of flight, and airgraphs

One hundred years after the Wright Brothers made the first heavier-than-air controlled flight (pace Percy Pilcher) on 17 December 1903, magazines are doing "future of flight" specials:
Economist, National Geographic (stunning photos, also here), and New Scientist (reg required). The 19 Dec 1903 first flight story is corrected here.

Also, a pair of non-scientific, hand-drawn airgraphs (acceleromaps? seismographs?): an Airbus A321 takes off from Edinburgh and lands at London Heathrow. (There are tube journeys as well).

Underground train drawing

In which a Northern Line train on London's Underground collaborates with the artist on 4 Dec 2003 to make some drawings.

• Tufnell Park to Kentish Town and Kentish Town to Camden Town. The train is conveying the artist in a sitting position, and the direction of travel is to the left.
• Camden Town to Kentish Town and Kentish Town to Tufnell Park. The train is conveying the artist in a standing position, resulting in a looser line, and the direction of travel is to the right.

Update, 5 Jan 04: We now have another 50 or so of these drawings. Soon. (What might they be used for?)

Haircuts of Future Vision: Future Cities

Haircuts from the left and from the right drawn at the Transport Research Group/LSE Cities' Future Vision: Future Cities conference, 6 Dec 2003. If you were there and recognise your hairdo, do, please, get in touch. Perhaps there will be more notes from this event in due course, but for now let's just say that it had some good moments, but tried to do too much.

Related: the hairlines of AIGA, from 6 Aug 2003.

Tessellate, rotate

Some working images from a project to create tessellatable shapes (ie tiles). These have rotational symmetry: rotors and shapes.

Lists found and wanted

Some good lists:

• political theory
• Social fiction
• Science fiction timeline 1980-1990
• Science/speculative fiction Utopias and Dystopias (see also Empty World, the apocalyptic fiction site)
• Real science fiction and fantasy authors who have been major characters in feature films

And some lists we'd like to see:

• A list of the book titles used in the argument-without-speech between Angela and Emile in Godard's Une Femme Est une Femme (A Woman is a Woman)
• A list of films about art. And a list of films that feature the act of writing. And a list (a database? an application?) that allows us to search the content of a film (in the same way as Amazon now searches books) for dialogue, and then show us the clips.
• A list of every building we've lived in. Or been to. And a list of every person who's visited our house, like the one Mrs Kelly keeps for hers. But it's too late now, we can't remember them all.
• An atlas of imaginary places (not quite the same as the Manguel/Guadalupi Dictionary of Imaginary Places)

Joining the flock

Mabel Kate, born 13 November 2003, the latest addition to the Julie-David-Rae flock.

Fully Articulated drawings, 2002-3

Fully Articulated comes from an interest firstly in the idea of "honest work" in art, secondly in testing hand, eye and brain, and thirdly in self-imposed constraints and limitations.

Honest work with constraints, physical and measurable work: Can loops or dots be drawn as fast or as consistently as possible, 50 or a hundred times? How quickly can the brain make the hand move whilst the eye ensures control? Can it be controlled without the watchful eye? Can a loop be repeated carefully at slow or high speeds? How may dots can be made in an hour? Can quality be maintained? Is it pointless (or point-ful?) to behave like a machine or a program? Can something be copied well? Would it be different for a right-hander? And: does anything interesting result from this?

So, here's a selection of them:

• Figure of eight (blue and brown ink, A4, November 2002)
• Eyes shut and eyes open (50 loops, slow) (black ink, A4, July 2002)
• Eyes shut, eyes open, eyes shut (50 loops, fast) (black ink, A4, July 2002)
• Fixed wrist, extended hand (pencil, A4, 2002) - drawing the biggest anti-clockwise loops possible with an immobile arm
• Loop in brown and an attempt to repeat as a Loop in green (brown and green ink, both A4, December 2002)
• Loop in blue (10 minutes) and an attempt to repeat the same shape with dots (25 minutes) (blue and black ink, A4, November 2002)
• Loop in black and its impression via carbon paper (black ink, and carbon ink, both A4, 2002)
• a second Loop in black and its impression via carbon paper (black ink, and carbon ink, both A4, 2002)
• Drawing dots whilst testing Cluedo, right-handed, 20 Nov 02, 19:45, 19:52, 20:02 (brown ink, A4, November 2002) - drawing to occupy the mind (and better use the time) whilst laboriously testing an telephony application made at work
• Dotting the largest circular disc possible in an hour (black ink, 24x33cm, January 2003) - trying to get the balance between speed, consistency and accuracy. Surprising how it is very painful to perform the same dotting motion for an hour.

They're all for sale too.

Other artists (and partly the inspiration)

• Giotto, who drew a perfect circle for the pope, according to Vasari
• John Maeda, a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT's Media Lab
• Tomoya Yamaguchi
• any others?

Émail aimé (duck-rabbit and rabbit-duck), 1996

Émail aimé: a duck-rabbit and a rabbit-duck face each other on an A3 page.

Drill drawings, 2001

The drill drawings were made by using pens and pencils in place of the drill bit (or more often, by fixing pens to a length of wooden dowel that was used instead of the drill bit). The drill is held, and the spinning pen lowered onto the paper. The image produced depends upon the speed of the drill, the orientation of the pens attached to the drill (and also the drill in the hands), and the nature of the ink in the pen. It is important that hammer action is switched off.

These were made for an incomplete '30 Years' project:

• Drill tests: blue and blue/red (blue and red ink, A3, October 2001) - 15 circles in blue, 15 in blue and red
• Drill tests: pink/green and red/brown (pink, green, red and brown ink, A3, October 2001) - as before 15 in pink/green, 15 in red/brown
• Drill tests: blue/pink/green/red and brown/pink/red/green (blue, pink, green, red and brown ink and red biro ink, A3, October 2001) - here the drill is used at a higher speed, resulting in ink splashes in the paper
• Drill tests: blue/red/red (blue and red ink and red biro ink, A3, October 2001) - here the drill is held increasingly loosely as the circles progress up the page
• Drill drawing: 30 brown and green circles, over a pencil network (brown and green ink, 24 x 34cm, 2001) - the 30 drilled circles are centred on the nodes of a 5 x 6 pencil marked grid. The last three nodes have been connected to every other node in the grid.

These are for sale.

Making art with drills or other tools isn't a new idea. Cf: Roman Verostko (and other plotter artists), the many computer artists, generative artists, etc. And there was someone else making drawings with an electric drill but they're eluding Google at present.