Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

Kalliopi Monoyios is an illustrator who bristles at questions about how much of her work is digital. She ponders perceptions of machine-aided art:

[I]f a machine could draw on its own, would it be able to produce images that move us in the same way that images made by a thinking, feeling human do? It would seem that a fair number of people hold the view that art produced by a machine could never hold a candle to “hand-drawn” images, despite their being enamored with animated films and hyper-realistic video games. In the same way that love still feels real and powerful and fraught with meaning even with the knowledge that it is, at its core, just a chain of chemical reactions, a drawing rendered by a machine can stir something deeply human even if you are aware of its mechanical origin.

She goes on to point to illustrations produced by Iron Genie (seen above), a harmonograph constructed by the artist Anita Chowdry:

Why was Chowdry, who clearly has the skills to create delicate and elaborate drawings with her own two hands, compelled to make an instrument to draw for her?

While it’s amusing to think she might have burned out on creating herintricate and exacting rosettes, the reality is quite different. In her own words,

The immediate appeal of the Harmonograph to me is that you can witness the unfolding of natural dynamic geometries that have always existed independently of our aesthetic sensibilities. We cannot draw them ourselves without the aid of mechanical devices. They have existed long before we discovered them, before we even began to understand the physics that drives them, before we had the language to define them in mathematical terms.

They are a part of the dynamics of the universe – they have existed long before us, and perhaps that is why we find it so hypnotic to watch the drawings unfold before our eyes as the swinging pendulums drive the movements of the pen and paper… in our own slick, virtual, digital age in which we feel less and less in control, a venerable analogue machine with simple workings that we can see, understand, and touch, offers a reassuring physicality.