mark ericson
about
U
about
I am an artist and educator whose work focuses the translation of historic modes of drawing into digital animations and images. This site contains a selection of work that encapsulates my research in the history of technical drawing and geometry. When we consider drawing and imaging in a digital context, it is often positioned as an extension of earlier pre-digital forms of description. Boundary representations, point clouds, meshes, and extended reality have all changed the means by which we image landscapes, objects, buildings and infrastructure. In these cases, questions surrounding digital representation have to do with the way in which new media can extend or otherwise further existing techniques through the powers of digital computation. My work considers another question: What can the technological limits of historical forms of representation offer to development of drawing with new media? This question is considered in each of the works contained in the Drawing Index of the site. I hold a Master's of Architecture from SCI_Arc and I am a public school educator in rural Vermont.
ericson.mark.c@gmail.com
drawing index
2012 - 2017
Primitive Drawings
Nameless Curves
Euclid’s Wedge
Reassembling Guarini
Domestic Inversion
Animating Guarini
The animations and images contained here are translations and extensions of the drawing instructions provided by the Italian architect and mathematician, Guarino Guarini, in his posthumous treatise Architettura Civile(1735). The instructions have been translated into the programming language of Python to generate animations in the open source software Processing. The animations use a single color expressed in values of red, green, and blue, which are scaled across different lines within the drawing until they approach the value corresponding to white. Line weight corresponds to the conventions of descriptive geometry, in which object lines are thicker and construction lines are thinner. All lines are solid. All animation titles begin with, “The Two-Dimensional Orthographic Projection of a Semicircle,” and end with a description of the operation on each page: “Onto an Interrupted Epicycle of….” All titles are descriptions, and all animations are two-dimensional orthographic projections. The work from this research was published in Animating Guarini: An Orthographic Project by Applied Researcha and Design in July of 2020.
Round Things
If we construct a material circle, measure its radius and circumference, and see if the ratio of these two lengths is equal to π , what shall we have done? We shall have made an experiment on the properties of the matter with which we constructed this round thing, and of that which the measure used was made. (Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1902)
The circle is perhaps one of the most iconic geometric figures in the history of drawing. Its prominent position in Euclid’s Elements ensured its appearance in treatise on drawing and geometry. And yet the circle, like all geometry, cannot be realized in material form. We can describe it as, Henri Poincaré points out, by the ratio of its radius and its circumference. We can also make a rough material approximation, a “round thing”, with a compass, a string, a computer or a numerically controlled cutting device. Regardless of the relative precision or sophistication of a digital or analog device, a true circle cannot be visualized or fabricated. Instead, we are left with “round things” that have the appearance of circles but are in fact not. roundThings() is a custom interactive software that uses the approximation of circular geometry and lighting to generate an endless configuration of round objects.
The project consists of a projected real-time interactive software written in javascript and glsl, The light influences the rendering of the surface in both hatching and contouring, but also changes the shape of the round thing. Every round thing within the software is constantly approximating another more precise geometry that can never described in material form. The projected imagery are precise miscalculations of ideal geometries. The images are then translated into instruction for a numerically controlled pen plotter and plotted in blue and black ink. There are no spheres or circles, only round things rendered in the material of which “the measure was made”—pixels.