Yes, Welcome everybody to the
One and a half Pen Plotting Party
As we kind of had half a party
before Christmas
but this time we have really stepped up with great advertising
and great projects going around as people
as you can see people are playing games, people are streaming
and sharing their passion for plotting
how did we end up here at this very moment
that's a good question
these old machines have been laying around here in the XPUB studio
for who knows how long
most of them are from like the late 80s and early 90s
and none of them were really functioning properly
but we did an overhaul and we have studied the HP-GL
which is the code language that these machines communicate through
(joseph) only the XPUB elders knew the language
yeah, we had to climb up a steep mountain
people can see here, there's lot of like photographic imagery
that has been made with like a cross-hatching technique
(kamo) plotographic imagery
plotographic, yeah
zines have been made, and you can read all about all the crazy projects
that has been going on in this amazing zine
which is also an ongoing project
so if anybody wants to contribute then
feel free to write a wiki article
it's very interesting working with these old machines and their limitations
cause that was kind of how this zine came into existence
cause the thing that moves the paper in this direction in this plotter (cause it's the same plotter)
was kind of stuck so it couldn't really move the paper far in this direction
so to work around this I just printed lines that goes parallel to this axis
and this kind of I don't know ... helped, made it possible...
you can't read more about it in the Pen Plotting in XPUB zine...
Maybe Thijs you want to talk a bit about the cross-hatching software
this crazy technology that can do amazing things
I guess it was kind of response to the lines that you were drawing
where at some point we decided that we wanted even more lines
so we used (sorry Michael) a Processing script to generate this
but I feel that this kind of opened up the opportunity to experiment more with color
which is nice and there are always artifacts with the alignment
the paper bulging in a certain way that causes unexpected lines
or unexpected densities of color which is a kind of fun collaboration with the plotter
two difficult parts: one is choosing the image
and the second part is: you have to prepare all the files which takes quite a bit of time
and the fun part of course is the plotting
so this was half an hour of preparing and then two and half hours of plotting...
so this is four layers, first yellow, then the pink color, then the cyan color, then a dark blue
and that's true for most of the plots on this table
but the colors are not the real pens intended for pen-plotting
they are what we call fun pens, we've made adapters
first by modifiying existing real pens, but later by 3D printing custom holders
and these holders can hold any pen you like in theory
you can watch the stream live on there, or live on air,
via the chat for which you do have to have an account, unfortunately,
you can send some commands and then the plot will go plotting,
you can send: rectangle, circle, a message (lb and then it will print the message)
up, down, leftt, right, and you can change the distance it travels by saying distance
and then a value (of 200 I think)
and a pen up and pen down
so technically you could solve the maze, I think through the chat
but that would take a very long time
it's a node.js application, but it was quite simple actually
it was just a serial port that you have to communicate with
and then twitch has a library for the chat
we made it in an evening I think, so it was nice...
(manetta) is the maze being used now here...
(manetta) ah manually, just with the arrows on the plotter, cool!
One thing that binds many of these projects together
is that there is a sense of collaboration or performance with the plotter
and I think it's something we're keen to explore more so
with the twitch, it's I think the first way that we can manipulate the plotter
at the same time with multiple people, and the manual drawing of the maze
is also kind of a way to do this colloboratively,
and I think it is a unique property of these machines
and also a kind of alluring aura that's drawn all of us in today