SE.2 – TWO-TERM Elective Seminar
On drawing and computation
(or: Computing lines)
–
Faculty: Edouard Cabay

We already draw without the hand; can we draw without the mouse, writing a protocol?
This course aims to produce a portfolio of drawings generated by coding. In the first part of the course you will draw by hand and write your own algorithm in order to produce a series of digital vectorial drawings. The second part is an exhibition: taking your work out of the academic world, confronting it to the public; we will design and mount our own exhibition in Barcelona, where the work will be debated between artists, critics, geeks and yourselves. This course targets students curious about coding and enthusiastic about developing – or experiencing – a sensibility for drawing. All participants will be encouraged to weave relations between the work of the seminar and their work in their respective studio projects.

The architectural drawing is a form of expression that enables one to project and to communicate.
A drawing conveys the traces of a process between the head and the hand; it doesn’t merely represent, it serves to construct an idea and to communicate instructions for its execution.
However, the role of drawing in our discipline today is significantly challenged: information flows in a non-material form across digital media. What hand and mouse have in common is the fact that their movements have a direct relationship to space: their position on the page – or digital canvas – implies a location in the space of the project. If we are to code our positions and actions, only numerical values describe our environment, considerably affecting our attitude towards design.
Starting from the observation of natural or physical phenomena (the swirls of a wave, the sand patterns into the wind…), we will derive a set of operative logics that characterize a movement or behavior. Abstracting these rules into a piece of written syntax, the algorithm, we will work recursively on creating a number of iterations in order to create a series of drawings, to be printed, compared and discussed. This course will see us working sometimes by hand, sometimes digitally, until a sensitive volume of drawing emerges under the form of a printed catalogue of evolution.

The last part of the course is an exhibition. You will revisit your drawings in order to create your own exhibition content: editing them or creating a new sequences, choosing a layout as a diptique, a triptique, a sequence… define format sizes, paper, printing mediums…
We will work collectively to design and construct the scenography of the show and eventually inaugurate with a day conversation on drawing and computation between artists, computer geeks, critics and ourselves!

—
Support will be provided in both media: drawing and computation.
—

Keywords: recursion, iteration, logics, data, order, organization, vector, pattern, system, calligraphy.