Chris Bly

Chris Bly, who plots under the name machine arm, is an artist I know through his Instagram — an inspiring feed full of architectural structure and swooshing imagery. He came to plotting the long way: high-school drafting classes, an architecture major traded for mathematics and computer science, life drawing on the side, and then — after losing his job during Covid — a pen plotter that rediscovered his love of art for him. He writes all his programs in p5.js ("my sketchbooks often contain as much math as they do drawings"), builds in noise and randomness so the computer gets to make some of the decisions, and catalogs every plot with an ma-number, from the tectonic tile subdivisions to Genuary prompts.

Artist's website (chrisbly.com) ↗

6 physical works