Even Bigger Robotic Drawing

Yet Another Art Nouveau Inspired Drawing
In Process
In Process

I had some fun issues during this project. They were extremely frustrating at the time, but they're the kind of thing that make you understand what's happening better when you have to learn why they're broken. 

At first, my units were wrong. I was working in feet for the sake of getting the paper size right, but having the document set to feet completely broke the grasshopper definition. Well, actually it worked exactly as it was supposed to, it's just that every numerical value in the definition was now relative to my document settings. Which is how I ended up with a Z offset of 10 feet. That took some figuring out and a lot of back and forth between Rhino and Avid. 

Then, my Gcode was throwing errors because I couldn't get grasshopper to stream the data the right way and had to just copy and paste. Then I had thirty thousand lines of code... that all had line numbers in front of them. Thank god there are sites that remove them for you with a single click. I guess it's a common problem. 

And there were a million other little things that went wrong along the way. I swear it felt like I was discovering every way not to do this project. But it did eventually get done and now I've got a big robot drawing. 

Conceptually this ended up being a turning point for me. I really like this drawing, which I think is why I wasn't very impressed by the robot's rendition of it haha. I think I've kind of run the course on the craft/machine contradiction for now. All I was thinking when I looked at the final product, with all of the evidence of the machine shaking and mashing the pen into the paper, was that I could have done it better by hand. The work other people have been doing has been much more interesting to me because they're leaning into things the machine excels at instead. Why not see what it can do that I can't, rather than pointing out the obvious. Machines aren't people, they're not good at a lot of the things we are, but they are certainly better than us at some things. I want to experiment more with that.

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