Like those engineers in the GM design lab, drawing is often still done by hand today
Felice Varini does amazing drawings, with his hands, that blur the lines of reality. He plays with the whole medium of Tromp-L’oeil, a renaissance tradition of depicting space on a 2-dimensional surface. What makes Varini so unique is that his drawings are in space and the surface is often a photograph or the idealized location of the viewer in that single location.
Like Holbein’s The Ambassador,viewers who wish to experience the full effect are locked into a single location to view this spatial drawing. A great book that describes the development of vision devices is Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. It presents a great history taking the reader from the Camera Obscura to Virtual Reality, developing an incredible argument about how powerful the device itself is in the control of what it is viewing.
All this is a long winded way of saying how excited I am to see Make Magazine’s Blog entry about a drawing machine that responds to sound:
Have speakers, robot arm, some engineering can draw!
look out for varini s work in the new V&A toilet refirb, should be done by beginning of feb….!