Mind the Machine

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Tristan Perch is currently on his second large wall drawing at the Georgia Museum of Art. Three drawings will stretch across one long white hallway on the second floor of the museum. When the third, final drawing is finished on September 3, 2014, the wall will be painted over. In the meantime, the wall is being drawn on not by Perch’s hand, but by a machine holding a pen. Perch programmed the machine to move around the wall to create this drawing as the pen in weighted down by a clip and gravity from a long wire. The artist, who also works in electronic sound art, is interested in the balance and interaction between the code (his program for the pen’s path on the wall) and physics (how it actually manifests in the environment). It certainly takes automatic drawing to the next level, although rather than stemming from the unconscious this stems from a programmed computer chip.

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