Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the 'anexact' qualities emerging from the relationship between drawing (understood as an action) and the passing of time (understood through Henri Bergson's Duration) by means of a digital-machinic robotic drawing apparatus built by the author.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relationships intersecting drawing and the passing of time (understood through Henri Bergson's Duration) in the context of a digital-machinic design process. It manifests Bergson's continuous becoming-other through a modality of drawing that enacts a succession of open-ended transformations, mobilising the friction between static and dynamic components to articulate a generative design mechanism. The source material for this endeavour are three animations of collectively captured, geo-localised paths of displacement of students at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia. These animations are rendered as dynamic urban plans, reconstructing Cagliari through the amalgamation of personal, subjective geographies. In order to re-enact this collective occupation of space, a robotic drawing machine is deployed to dynamically trace its animation data streams. Its drawing protocol reinstates the passing of time as a component of the collectively constructed urban landscape as it remaps the territorial occupation into the target surface of the paper. However, the machine is not completely up to the job: The drawing head endlessly chases the moving targets of the pathways as they play out -simultaneously- in the spatial sequence. Thus, the resulting plan(s) of urban simultaneity exist solely on the paper surface. By watching the machine at work we catch a glimpse of the continuous-but-heterogeneous dynamics of duration affecting the gradual unfolding of our collective displacements across Cagliari. Tapping into Derrida's re-reading of Edmund Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, these anexact, robotic urban plans convey the heterogeneous and continuous character of the processes that originate them: Never static, always becoming-other.