Browse by Machine

Konrad Zuse's precision flatbed drawing machine. Frieder Nake wrote base software for it as a student, and drew his earliest works on it at Stuttgart in 1963–65.

California Computer Products' drum plotters were the workhorses of early American computer art — sprocket-fed paper, ink pens, and mainframe-driven line work.

The high-resolution Benson flatbed at the Météorologie Nationale in Paris drew Manfred Mohr's programmed works from 1970 until his move to New York.

Harold Cohen built his own plotters and drawing 'turtles' to give AARON, his autonomous drawing program, a hand in the physical world — from the Stedelijk in 1977 to the Tate and Brooklyn Museum in 1983.

Hewlett-Packard's desktop pen plotter of the mid-1980s, resurrected decades later by artists driving it with modern code over HPGL.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories' pen plotter became the reference machine of the contemporary plotter community — simple, precise, and endlessly hacked.

Bantam Tools' successors to the AxiDraw line, built in Peekskill, New York — pen plotters and large-format drawing machines used by a new generation of artists.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories' watercolor-painting robot (built with Super Awesome Sylvia in 2013) — a pen-plotter architecture that swaps the pen for a wet brush and a paint palette.

Many contemporary plotter artists build their own machines — from 3D-printer-part contraptions to room-scale painting plotters — treating the machine itself as part of the work.

Before digital plotters, artists photographed electron traces on cathode-ray screens — Herbert W. Franke's late-1950s 'Dance of the Electrons' among the earliest machine-made art anywhere.

Line printers, dot-matrix heads, and misbehaving laser printers have all served as art machines — building images from type characters or from a computer's raw chatter.