Tristan Perich - Machine Drawings

My art and my music are about simple forms and the intersection of randomness, order and composition. The Machine Drawings—pen on paper or wall drawings executed by a machine that I designed and built—use randomness and order as raw materials within a composition. I am inspired by physics and math, so the machine drawings are a combination of the delicacy of real drawings and the rigid, structured system of mechanics and code.

The system allows me to explore the limits of traditional drawing. The machine creates pen drawings that have a mechanical precision. It can run indefinitely, usually creating works that would take multiple days of non-stop drawing by hand to complete. At the same time, the system itself is delicate. The final drawings have a nervousness of the pen that a computer simulation alone cannot emulate. It is this balance between the code and the pen that excites me most, for the drawings couldn't be made without the code, and the code couldn't create the drawings on its own.

Overlapping Triangles (paper, 52" X 126", detail)

Untitled Bands (paper, 50" X 108")

Untitled Bands (above, installation)

Untitled Bands (above, detail)

Untitled Bands (above, process)

The machine—a pen, suspended horizontally by fishing line connected to two motors mounted on a wall and held taught by gravity—is overwhelmingly simple, and this simplicity allows me to make the process used to create the drawings transparent. The two motors, each allowing winding and unwinding of the fishing line, suggest four possible movements of the pen. The machine is echoed in the drawings: there are no straight lines, only the partial arcs of giant circles, centered around each motor, formed by one motor rotating at a time. At all times, the pen is either moving continuously or randomly changing direction.

All of this is controlled by a microchip. I program the composition for each drawing: how large it is and which regions of it will consist of random or ordered movement of the pen. This is my role as the artist. Then I let go and let the system and its indeterminacy take over. The motors, the geometry, the code, the pen, the paper or wall, all are married in the drawings. The final drawings are studies of how randomness inside a structured composition can be beautiful.