Equal parts author and instrument, the Drawing Machine is mechanical but unpredictable, creating one-offs instead of more of the same. It’s a machine that needs you to tell it what to do, only to surprise you with the outcome. It doesn’t execute; it cooperates – but always with a mind of its own.

Discarded desktop printers, a spinning wheel and a cast-away chair form the basis of this machine, a machine that honours its printing ancestors by doing something altogether new. As the operator you feed it ink and paper and manipulate its settings, and the machine produces a drawing in response. The drawings may resemble the scratch work of an angry abstract expressionist, the detailed renderings produced by a 3D-scanner, or painstaking spirographs reminiscent of childhood. Each drawing is unique; the machine is incapable of copying itself. Challenging the traditional distinction between human volition and machine docility and muddying the waters of authorship, the Drawing Machine produces more than ink-on-paper artworks: it produces a new relationship to technology. This new relation is one not of control, but of surrender and surprise.

Unique piece

Material: old printers, chairs, spinning wheel

and other leftover parts

Dimensions: 70 x 80 x 90 cm

Year: 2020