How It's Made
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"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination." - Einstein
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Low-Level Answer
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I write software which produces a collection of lines. Each line can be thought of as a list of points [A, B, C, D, ....] which structures where the line goes through. With this collection of lines, the robot can then translate that into mechanical operations. For example, to draw the line [A, B, C] the robot first runs PENUP, GOTO(A), PENDOWN, GOTO(B), GOTO(C), PENUP.
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High-Level Answer
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My particular style for making art is what I call "sandbox art". What I mean by that is that my artistic process is driven by exploration and play like a kid in a sandbox rather than a specific desire. Usually to start off a piece I either have no idea what I want to do or a vague notion of something to try or something to achieve. My creation process then ends up being of trying something or tweaking and seeing the effect and using my intuition at the moment to guide me. For me, I try to change, brake, fix, tweak, or tune until I get something that excites me.
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FAQ
What kind of plotter do you use?
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Right now I mainly use an Axidraw V3 A3, but stay tuned for the near feature when I make something bigger :)
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How long does a piece take to make?
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There are a lot of answers to this question, and it depends on how you amortize time spent. To physically draw them with my plotter usually takes around 1-10 hours depending on complexity. To develop the program to generate a piece can take anywhere from an afternoon if the idea is simple and I've already developed the tools I need or a couple of weeks if I need to big out a large scale internal software library to make it.
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What do you program with?
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Typically I program in Python and I make heavy use of the traditional ML stack (numpy, sklearn, scipy, etc). You can see a write-up of one of my pieces in this tutorial.
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