Instructional Drawing

1. Draw 36 small circles randomly scattered on the paper. Fill in the circles.
2. Pick 2 random circles such that neither is connected. Draw a path between them such that
– the path does not cross any existing paths nor circles
– the path consists of only connected line segments
– the path consists of fewest number of line segments possible
3. Repeat step 2 until there are no unconnected circles left.

Here are the 3 results:

2013-09-03 00.16.22 2013-09-03 00.17.24 2013-09-03 00.17.49

I should have specified that the circles don’t overlap. The circles should also be paired up to be connected to each other and not any other circles. I considered describing the circles as “lone nodes” (for my fellow comp sci majors) in step 2, but decided against it last minute. Now I think I should have included that part after all. The pairs of circles should be chosen at random, but it seems like they all mostly chose the pairs to be close-by circles to draw straight lines with.

The 3 samples ended up looking like constellations, which was unintended, but pretty cool. I found it amusing how they all put in effort to make each circle interesting (note those 3-D shading).

My initial draft (with fewer circles), was inspired by circuit boards, in case you’re curious.

2013-09-03 00.18.24

Hilary Mason: Buildings in the Netherlands

This caught my attention at first because it’s by Hilary Mason, who I admire and who usually tweets interesting things. Second, because I’m interested in mapping. The reason I chose to post this tweet here rather than another was because the link in the tweet was very interesting too—it’s aesthetically pretty, and as you look at it, you get more out of it. For example, it raises questions about how the city evolved and why.

Reverse Engineering Computational Drawing

Instructions

  1. Pick 3 random points.
  2. Draw lines toward the edges of the paper from those points.
  3. For each initial line, draw a line which branches off of the initial line which is perpendicular to it, that is going toward another initial line’s start point. End the line when it collides with another line or before then.
  4. Repeat step 3, branching off the lines you draw and the initial lines.
  5. Stop branching in an area when you form a shape with a very small area (e.g., smaller than the tip of a Crayola crayon.)

Photo Sep 02, 10 34 55 PMPhoto Sep 02, 10 35 47 PM

Photo Sep 02, 11 58 32 PM

 

Adam-Assignment-02-Reverse

 

  1. Lines may never cross
  2. The sum length of the lines making up a polygon must not be longer than half the width of the page
  3. Draw a polygon consisting of 3-6sides
  4. Repeat

Scan

Instructional Drawing

Preface

My instructional drawing task emphasizes these two points of the Conditional Design Manifesto.

The process is the product.

Input should come from our external and complex environment: nature, society and its human interactions.

Instructions

  1. Write down a list of your closest friends. Keep it under 10 people.
  2. Draw a self portrait in the middle of the page. Keep it small and simple—not much bigger than your thumbnail.
  3. You’re going to draw each friend’s thumbnail portrait so they form a circle around you. Try to place friends who know each other adjacent to each other. Keep this in mind as you follow the next set of instructions for each friend.
  4. If the friend lives within walking distance, draw them about 1 inch away frm you. If they live within driving distance, draw them 2 inches away. If they live within plane-flying distance, draw them 3 inches away.
  5. Draw lines between friends that know each other.
  6. If you’ve seen them in person in the past week, draw a line between you and them. If you’ve seen them multiple times, draw several lines.
  7. If you’ve digitally communicated with them in the past week, draw a dotted line between you and them. If you’ve communicated multiple tiems, draw multiple dotted lines.

Output

e-edit

Photo Sep 02, 10 58 23 PM

Photo Sep 02, 11 42 08 PM

l-edit

 

Evaluation

My intention for this drawing task was to get people to reflect on their relationships with close friends and how they maintain those relationships. Based on casual feedback from classmates who did this task, it did achieve that.

People got confused by the sequence of instructions (especially regarding the spacing of friends in a circle around the drawer). The other piece that I should have emphasized was that the drawings were intended to be simple (I was expecting more stick-figure type drawings), and that people could have erased the names of friends to protect privacy.

The drawings that the instructions generated were interesting in a conceptual sense, but I think I could try to tinker with the instructions to make the drawings more aesthetically appealing.

Melanie Nailed It

Students, I thought you might be interested in the results of our Lewitt Wall Drawing assignment from Assignment 02.

You were asked to execute a Sol Lewitt wall drawing, as many gallery assistants have done before you:

I now present to you Lewitt’s “original” solution from 1974, below. His image and his text (“code”) are both reproduced from “Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule Based Art“, an exhibition catalogue published by Pace Gallery, New York in 2005.

lewitt-result-1974

I did some ‘shopping to align your various solutions, compensating for variations in position, size, rotations, and (in one or two cases) some minor quadrilateral warping. Here are all of your solutions aligned and overlaid:

all-lewitt

As you can see, there is considerable variation. Another way to view this is over time. Here’s an animated GIF of your solutions; Lewitt’s version has been labeled and has a 3-second pause:

lewitt-animated

Of the 13 solutions you posted by 10pm, only one was ‘correct’, matching the published drawing: Melanie Kim’s. Here you can see her version overlaid against Lewitt’s. She correctly parsed his code (which you can confirm from her guidelines), and her execution is correct to within the precision of her ‘output system’.

lewitt-melanie

If I were Pace Gallery, I know whom I would hire. 

(Miles and Michelle also came close. Miles got the bottom two points correct, while Michelle got the top two. Michelle has asserted that the statement, as it appears in the Pace catalogue, only makes sense when an additional phrase is added. In any case, each of the corners of Lewitt’s quadrilateral was reliably located by about a quarter of the students.)

Incidentally, I would like to bring attention to the marvelous pseudocode system that Melanie developed for parsing Lewitt’s statement. (Others of you did something similar: notably Julia, Chloe and Miles.) As far as I’m concerned, Melanie has earned the right to title her pseudocode as she did. This document is really a gem: through its indentation and other typographic cues, Melanie presents a visualization of the structure of Lewitt’s work which is not otherwise available in either of the versions officially published by Pace.

melanie-parse

 

Adam-Assignment-02-Instructional

Screen Shot 2013-09-02 at 10.15.30 PMScan Scan 4 Scan 5

Scan 6

 

two out of four of my test subject misinterpreted my instructions and actually drew what I had intended them to draw – a maze.

I made the mistake of not defining the condition that would make them stop drawing a line when that line was about to intersect a line that had been previously drawn.

Surprisingly only one exclaimed that I had got them to draw a maze while they were still in the process of drawing. The others only made the realisation after finishing and looking back at their work.  The subject who made the realisation actually exclaimed “hah, now the mouse can’t get the cheese” – he purposely blocked off the cheese. The environment and interpretation of my intentions in giving them the task affected the image that he drew.

I think that this might be an interesting starting point for and idea to try on Mechanical Turk – getting people to generate mazes which other people then solve.

Adam-Assignment-02-Lewitt

OuchMyEyesMyBrain.

C̶o̶d̶e̶.̶ ̶L̶e̶w̶i̶t̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶r̶o̶o̶m̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶p̶r̶e̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶.̶ ̶W̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶r̶e̶m̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶,̶ ̶o̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶b̶j̶e̶c̶t̶i̶v̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶.̶

I take back everything that I said previously. It was written pre Golan’s post, when I had (proudly) thought that I had conquered the piece. Lewitt’s instructions are definitely code. Code not fit for human consumption. While the instructions do have an objective truth to them, we humans are not built to decipher and follow such things. The world needs to be more human. I appreciate the importance of proper syntax when coding. This also re-enforced my dislike for the instruction manuals that come with consumer electronics. They are written in a similar manner to Sol’s instructions.

Reminded me of a segment of John Maeda’s talk (watch from 11m 55s )  –

 

sol lewitt sol lewitt notes

Reverse

“First, mark a point midway between the midpoint of the center of the page and the midpoint of the right hand side of the page. Second, draw four lines of different lengths protruding from this same point. Then draw lines coming from these lines until you tire of drawing lines. Third, draw a line reaching from the midpoint between the upper left hand corner and the lower left hand corner to the first point you drew. Continue to draw lines protruding from this line. Now draw lines protruding from these lines. Fourth, mark a third point in the upper-left hand region of the page. Draw lines protruding from this dot for three minutes. Fifth, ensure that the majority of lines on the page are enclosed into boxes, with closed sides. No two boxes next to each other should be exactly the same size. Additional lines may be drawn to enforce this.”

NB: After drawing this, I realized there is no way it would ever return either of the sample algorithms. Mostly because of: (a) the line drawn connecting the midpoint of the left hand side and the first point drawn does not exist on one of the samples and (b) the lines coming from point c are not radial in nature. However, the possibilities continue to be endless in nature.

Here was my try at executing my own algorithm:
Reverse Kristina

Instructional

“First, mark three dots on your page: the first dot should be halfway between the midpoint between the upper left hand corner and the midpoint between the center of the page and the midpoint of the left hand side and the bottom left hand corner of square with sides each a third of the length of the short side of the page. The second should be two thumbs up from the bottom right hand corner of the page at an angle of sixty degrees. The third should be along the radius produced by your fingertips when your wrist is placed on the bottom left hand corner of the page, where a line drawn where the first point halfway between the midpoint of the bottom side and the midpoint of the midpoint of the bottom side and the second point is the midpoint of the upper side crosses the radius. Next, join the first point and the third point. Then join the third point and the upper right hand corner, and the upper right hand corner and the second point. Draw a line which forms a triangle with height of 5cm between these two lines.”

The following are the three results other people obtained “compiling” by “code”. One thing that surprised me was that all two of my roomates decided to make the triangle a right-angled triangle, where one side is 5cm tall rather than making an isosceles triangle with overall height of 5 cm, which was what I would have done automatically. Second, all three asked me for a protractor in the middle. (I do not have one.) I had intended for the angle to be more of an indication than a precise measurement. Finally, I had intended for the triangle to show up in very near the center of the image, but slightly off to the side and slightly upwards in a “rule of thirds” fashion. This… did not come through. (I suppose using units like “thumb” and “radius of fingertips” did not help this.) Next time I will have to try to make composition a stronger element, and perhaps deviate somewhat from LeWitt and create a more artistic formula like those shown in the video.

Instructional Pragnatrial3