ART WORK The Joy of YDKEWYGUYGI

By Douglas Repetto

LIKE MOST TECHNOLOGIES, MANY EARLY mark-making machines were purely practical, usually addressing the pre-printing-press need for quick and easy copying. The automaton craze of the 18th century produced the first completely mechanical drawing and writing machines, as well as some of the first machines with mechanisms that were as interesting as their outputs. (And sometimes more so!)

Swiss inventor Henri Maillardet made a machine that could produce four different drawings and three poems encoded on a large set of complex cams. It signed its own work by writing “Ecrit par L’Automate de Maillardet” (“Written by Maillardet’s Automaton”) in the border of the final poem — perhaps evidence that even the earliest mark-making machine makers were playing with questions of authorship and intention. Maillardet’s automaton is on display at the Franklin Institute. It still works!

You might think that advances in printing technology would have meant the end of homemade mark-making machine mania, but they haven’t. Although inkjet and laser printers do a great job of creating clean copies of full-color text and images, they’re not so great at doing some of the things that make manual mark-making so interesting.

Sure, you can simulate brush strokes in your digital painting program, but making real brush strokes is more fun. While untold thousands of engineering hours have gone into making sure that WYSIWYG when you send a job to your printer, there’s still a lot of interest in systems where you don’t know exactly what you’ll get until you’ve got it (YDKEWYGUYGI).

Jean Tinguely, a 20th-century Swiss artist, is best known for his large kinetic sculptures made from scavenged industrial debris. Starting in the late 1950s, Tinguely made a series of “Méta-matic” draw-

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ing machines, complex jumbles of gears, springs, and weights. The unpredictability of the mechanism coupled with the choices made by the user ( selecting different kinds of papers and brushes or making adjustments to the mechanism itself) assures that no two runs of the machine are alike. This is a theme that, ironically, appears often in machine-made art: non-repeatability and the potential (and pitfalls) of infinite variety. If you’re ever in Basel, make sure to check out the Tinguely Museum — there’s even a working Méta-matic that you can play with for € 1.

In the late 1970s, Croatian-American artist Anton Perich built a large, light-controlled painting machine from cobbled-together parts of sewing machines and industrial debris he found on Canal Street in Manhattan. There’s a telling quote in The

“Anton was home with his painting machine and I was so jealous. My dream. To have a machine that could paint while you’re away.” —Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Diaries about Perich’s machine (they were neighbors): “Anton was home with his painting machine and I was so jealous. My dream. To have a machine that could paint while you’re away. But they said he had to be there while it painted because it clogs up.”

Warhol was being wry here, but he brought up a common misconception; the motivations of mark-making machine makers are generally more complex and interesting than “I want a machine to do my work for me.” For some artists, the output of