I Spent The Last Two Years Making A Light Painting Robot That Draws Natural Patterns

I’ve been always fascinated by geometry in nature, and astonished by the way nature follows rules, strictly.

Imagine the shell of a mollusk, it’s seems so perfect to our eyes, and in fact it’s proportions are intuitively pleasurable to us; those are generated by following geometric rules from beginning to end.

I wanted to give these patterns a place to shine in the digital world, where most things follow hypes, are quickly disposable and soon forgotten. So I made an installation, called Non-Viral series, where visitors have to exercise patience and fascination before the artifact is generated.

The visitor of Non-Viral Series is invited in a gloomy or dark space to admire the installation that consists of a camera stand in front of a vertical plotter, or robot. The robot head as a RGB LED and moves in space, leaving a trace of a natural pattern, the camera opens its shutter when the robot start drawing and closes it when the robot is done. The robot is performative and visitors are asked to mentally imagine the pattern that is drawn in front of their eyes, but they won’t have the final picture revealed until the end. A pattern can take any time between 5 minutes and an hour to be drawn.

The result is a series of long exposure photographs where each of them has digital and analog qualities. The photographs have an esthetic that encompass the imperfection of the moving robot and influence of external elements but reflect the perfection of geometrical patterns found in nature.

The patterns are inspired by everyday animals or plants, like birds, flowers, sea algae and they are crafted programmatically with the creative coding platform: Processing.

The installation uses Arduino Boards for the robot, the Tramontana ecosystem for the communication between camera and robot, openFrameworks to display the progress and handle the camera thanks to the canon SDK and the ofxCanonEOS plugin.

The robot can be also transported and installed outside, where it naturally belongs.

Non-Viral Series was presented in collaboration with Zaza Zuilhof at CODAME in San Francisco in June 2018.

More info: pierdr.com