What is a Drawing Machine?

“Drawing machine” is shorthand for any device/apparatus/mechanism/aid/instrument that draws or assists in the act of drawing. Since the early 1400s when perspective drawings set an agenda of using mathematics and geometry to organize vision; artists, scientists, and inventors have created devices to assist in the drawing. This is not limited to "drawing realistically from life." Prisms attached to microscopes, gears, and linkages joining forces for complex geometrical drawings are also drawing machines.

The ground rules:

• A drawing machine must control—or help a user control—a stylus. A "stylus" is the pointy thing that leaves a mark or line behind it when applied, with pressure, to a surface. This can be a pen, quill, pencil, airbrush, etc. In the 21st century, this also includes pens for touchscreens.
   
• When used to draw from life, a drawing machine inserts itself into the stylus-hand-eye circuit. As the artist holds a stylus in her hand, whose movements are coordinated by eye, the drawing machine can guide the eye, or control the stylus, or enhance the hand.
   
• A drawing machine can be an automated machine. This can be a set of human-powered gears or mechanical linkages (turn a handle, direct a pointer) that create an image through a machine-held stylus. The machine reduces the error of hand drawing, and allows complex drawing activities, or draws invisible or abstract ideas like spirographs.

What isn't a Drawing Machine?

A drawing must be drawn; Photographic cameras and printers are imaging tools, but they don't draw. A drawing is a slow reveal, the gradual increase of marks into an image.

“Draw” is related to the Old English “drag”, both the verb and noun “draw” are related to dragging or pulling.

Producing a picture by making lines and marks — to draw — literally means to pull or drag a pencil or pen across a surface. It is a physical act. You chase, seek, and pursue the final drawing.

If you draw, then you know this is true. Drawing requires refined coordination between the eye, the hand, and the dozens of muscles in between. Drawing the likeness of something or someone requires patience; the hand drags the pencil along a path laid out by the eye. 

Source: drawingmachines.org - A project by Pablo Garcia.

Project: Connecting cross country with a line, 2013
 Artist: Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson’s drawing machine Connecting cross country with a line, 2013, sketched a series of drawings as the train made its way, cross-country, through the United States of America.

In artistic documentation of movement and travel, Olafur Eliasson’s device sketches a series of drawings as it travels by train. ‘Connecting cross country with a line’ is part of an ongoing project ‘station to station’ — a collaborative cultural creation currently journeying from the Atlantic Ocean to the pacific coast, making creative ‘pit-stops in various cities along the way.

Olafur’s drawing machine is installed in one of the train cars, where it calls on the train's motion to move an ink ball along the surface of a white sheet of round paper. As the black-pigmented sphere slides, bounces, and rolls across the layer of paper, it traces the motion it encounters. The result is drawing of the cities and towns it travels across. Since the train has taken off, three drawings have been realized, with a total of 20 anticipated throughout the course of the cross-country trip. When the creative journey concludes, the machine will return to Berlin, where Eliasson will frame each drawing and write a poem to accompany them.