MACHINE DRAWINGS

Missile Defenses, Landscape 015

 
 
 

These drawings are the culmination of a multidisciplinary process and a complex translation of my ideas. I’m using a CNC router as a drawing machine to create an image that blurs the boundaries between contemporary technologies, photography and the traditions of drawing. The resulting delicately layered multi colored ink drawings appear to be some kind of digital mirage floating within the paper. Working from photographs I build vector drawings of the worlds I envision similar to how I build the physical landscapes in my photographs. I then translate those vector pieces into paths for the CNC to follow while holding a pen. Each drawing is comprised of multiple layers of ink and can take fifty or more hours to finish. All of the drawings are unique and can not be replicated a second time. While the machine is insistent and literal, I have intentionally manipulated the process to provide the opportunity for chance to inform outcome. Made entirely out of horizontal lines these intricate landscapes appear digitized and contain glitches and artifacts of the process which clearly reference interlaced video and the aesthetic of surveillance. Revealed within these ruinous worlds are the technologies of surveillance and communications juxtaposed with the weapons and systems related to global conflicts past and present. This visual combination speaks to the tensions between what we find beautiful and what terrifies us.

The current revolution in (interactive) transmission is in turn provoking a commutation in the urban environment whereby the image prevails over the thing it is an image of; what was once a city becoming little by little a paradoxical agglomeration, relationships of immediate proximity giving way to remote interrelationships.”

“A transapparent horizon spawned by telecommunications, that opens up the incredible possibility of a ‘civilization of forgetting’, a live (live-coverage) society that has no future and no past, since it has no extension and no duration, a society intensely present here and there at once - in other words, telepresent to the whole world.
— Paul Virilio