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I’ve recently starting using a pen plotter to create artwork. Here’s some of what I’ve been working on...

Sound Circles
This ‘sound circle’ is created by visualising a small sample of audio. It’s really a 3D circular graphic equalizer. This piece is a field recording based on a performance by Phan-Tu and Francisco Amoscotegui. Below you can listen to the recording and see a timelapse of the piece being created. 


I made this golden sound circle as a gift for a friend who loves drum and bass, I used a sample of the track ‘Fire’. 


Humpback Whale Song


I sampled audio from Google’s ‘Pattern Radio: Whale Songs’ which uses “artificial intelligence model on their vast collection of underwater recordings” to enable you to navigate a vast archive. You can hear some of the recording below. I visualised a small sample of the audio really just in an attempt to look at the sound from a new perspective.  This was another long plot, with about 200 metres of lines drawn over 4 hours. 









Auto-Kandinsky 
These plots are from a system I’ve made which takes musical MIDI data and creates these images. It  creates thousands of variations of which I go through and choose my favourites.  The images in some ways reflect the aesthetic of the Bauhaus but the reference to Kandinsky is more a reference to the artists pursuit of a kind of ‘synesthetic’ artwork, a kind of visual music. The audio (12 Études, Opus 8 - Sofronitsky) I’ve used here is by a contemporary of Kandinsky, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. He too was an artist interested in synesthesia, mysticism and visual music. 

Below I created a variant of the system which takes the same data and creates an animation. Just for extra fun if you have the Artivive phone app, you can focus the camera on the artwork and it will create an AR version of the animation for you. 





Noise Flower
This plot uses one continuous line that spirals outwards. As it does so it becomes increasingly effected by a noise field. This took the plotter 5 1/2 hours hours to create and travelled a distance of 167 metres.

Yantra

“Yantra (यन्त्र) (Sanskrit) (literally "machine, contraption") is a mystical diagram.” -Wikipedia
Combining DNA and the platonic solids I’m attempting to create a modern yantra. A wheel for meditation, half human, half machine.
 
Running on Cargo