Polish-German artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski gives buoyancy to the act of drawing with ADA, a large inflatable drawing tool. Filled with helium, ADA floats freely, making lines with its charcoal spikes as it moves through a room. More dramatic mark-making starts to occur when humans are added to the mix: the video above shows visitors engaging with ADA at Muffathalle where it was installed for a week in Munich, Germany.

The artist describes ADA in a statement: “The globe put in action fabricates a composition of lines and points, which remain incalculable in their intensity, expression, and form however hard the visitor tries to control ADA, to drive her, to domesticate her. Whatever he tries out, he would notice very soon, that ADA is an independent performer, studding the originally white walls with drawings and signs.”

Via Colossal

The Harmonograph Synthesiser is exactly as its name suggests: Campbell connected a modern, modular synthesizer to an 18th-Century harmonograph, an antiquated apparatus that uses pendulums to render geometric shapes. Two of the swinging mechanisms move linearly with the pen, while the third rotates with the board. Each triggers the synthesizer when movement occurs, which creates the corresponding audio track. An additional microphone picks up the noise of the pen.

Inspired by the 19th century "rose engine" lathes used to perform a complex radial engraving technique called Guilloche and the 1920's game Hootnanny, Craig Newswanger  created this drawing machine that creates intricate patterns using step motors and drawing arms.

"Guilloché is the word used to describe intricate repetitive patterns often used in security printing and fine metal working. The machine uses three micro-step motors that are controlled by a program written in Puredata. Careful control of the motor speed ratios and positioning of the pen arms results in complex patterns. Some of the best patterns are the result of setting the speeds very near but not quite on specific harmonic relationships. The pen traces a Lissajous curve and the paper rotates beneath the pen, thus tracing out the complex pattern. The patterns take from 10 minutes to and hour to create."

Designed by Carlo Ratti Associate, Scribit is a drawing machine that is mounted on a vertical wall, and interacts with an app to draw custom art that can be erased and replaced again and again. 

Scribit

Combining Pen Plotter Technology with Silk Painting

Antonia Gauss (and here) and Eva Benhamou developed the industrial part using a pen plotter system and dye brushes adapted to textile processes. The fabric component, meanwhile, is inspired by researching the dyeing technique of silk painting and mixing it with acid dye. Process-wise, the duo begins by placing a white silk fabric in the machine and rolling it up; the material is thus stretched and painted in a wet state frame by frame (the width of the format is 40 cm), making it possible to print in infinite length.

Learn more here: https://www.designboom.com/design/antonia-gauss-eva-benhamou-develop-textile-dyeing-system-using-pen-plotter-08-07-2023/

"Artist Jo Fairfax created automated drawing machines inspired by Japanese zen gardens. The artist’s programming experience coupled with his appreciation for the sensibility of zen gardens, led him to design this mechanical artwork. 

The machines generate shapes in iron filings, in response to people approaching them. Fairfax programmed an Arduino Uno to set off a mechanism with integrated magnets below the platform of iron filings. Each time a viewer approaches the machine, it starts to ‘draw’ and agitate the black particles, moving them around the platforms."

Learn more here: https://www.designboom.com/art/jo-fairfax-automated-mechanical-japanese-zen-gardens-05-17-2019/

"The ‘hamster-powered drawing machine’ is a personal project of multi-media artist Neil Mendoza. Utilizing openframeworks and box2d, two cams were created, exported as vectors, and cut from plywood via CNC. The drawing — Joji the hamster’s masterwork — is embedded directly into the inside rim of the cams. As Joji’s little legs crank away, mechanical arms roll along plywood edges, directing the pencil attached.

Placed next to the larger cams, is a smaller circle that serves as the hamster’s domain. An LCD displays the artist and wheel — don’t worry he’s not trapped in there — with a small raspberry pi computer behind. joji runs, and the pi sends commands to a motor via ethernet, controlling the speed of the ‘drawing machine’." 

Learn more here: https://www.designboom.com/art/hamster-powered-drawing-machine-neil-mendoza-joji-07-10-2016/

"New York-based artist Jonathan Schipper’s ‘Detritus’ is an infinitely dynamic environment composed of salt, digital machinery, and hot water bathing. The immersive installation is made up of twelve tons of salt stretching from end to end of the gallery floor, while a metallic mechanism suspended from the ceiling by cables ascends and descends onto the mineral plane. By varying the length of the four tethers, the device moves around the room, lowering itself onto the surface where it extrudes and builds three-dimensional, abstracted salt forms from layers upon layers of the material. The resulting mass arrangement revealed from the heaps of fine grains simulate architectural landscapes, and city skylines — representations of man-made objects. As part of the exhibition, viewers have the option of observing the salt sculptures’ fabrication from the comfort of a hot tub nearby, forcing an inevitable destruction of the builds as they enter and exit the pool of water."

Learn more here: https://www.designboom.com/art/detritus-builds-salt-sculptures-as-visitors-watch-from-a-hot-tub-10-21-2013/

"Viennese artist Alex Kiessling and strukt design studio will embark on a cross-border project that merges art and technology by using industrial robots to simultaneously create large-scale drawings in three european cities. Taking place at an event hosted by the Vienna tourist board on September 26th, 2013, ‘long distance art’ will feed real-time tracking via satellite to the two remote robotic devices, one stationed in Berlin, at breitscheidplatz, and the other in London, at Trafalgar square, and will mirror Kiessling’s movements in real time. The project calls on the use of a prototyping program called VVVV, which facilitates the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, and audio and video that can interact with many users at the same time. Once completed, Kiessling will take all three independent artworks from the various cities and join them together in a triptych." 

Learn more here: https://www.designboom.com/art/long-distance-art-robot-simultaneously-draws-in-three-european-cities/

"In an artful documentation of movement and travel, Olafur Eliasson‘s kinetic device autonomously sketches a series of drawings as it travels by train....[the] project is a dynamic drawing machine installed in the one of the train cars, where it calls on the locomotive motion to move an ink ball along the surface of a white sheet of round paper. as the black-pigmented sphere slides, bounces and rolls across the layer of paper, it traces the topography it encounters. 

The result is visual representation of the cities and towns it traverses. Since the train has taken off, three drawings have been realized, with a total of 20 anticipated throughout the course of the cross-country trip. When the creative campaign concludes, the machine will return to Berlin, where Eliasson will frame each composition and author a poem to accompany them.

Learn more here: https://www.designboom.com/art/olafur-eliasson-kinetic-drawing-machine-for-station-to-station/