Plotter work

A napkin bearing lipstick-like marks and a handwritten-style phone number evokes a familiar gesture of flirtation. Informed by reflections on amatonormativity and heteronormativity, and the artist’s distance from normative romantic and sexual scripts, the work asks how computational tools can simulate bodily presence and intimacy. Its deliberately imperfect resemblance makes visible a distance from the desires, intentions, and social conventions the gesture usually signifies.

Photographs of the artist’s lips were traced into vector paths and reproduced on the delicate napkin by a pen plotter using a lipstick-coated brush. The number was plotted in a Hershey stroke font. Calling it connected visitors to a recorded message about amatonormativity, delivered in an AI clone of the artist’s voice—extending the work’s layers of mediation across visual, material, and auditory forms.

Exhibited at the Bantam Machine Art Gallery.

[Circum]Scribed explores censorship, political expression, and authorship through human-written language, algorithmic randomness, and mechanical inscription. It asks whether distributing the production of an expression across a person and a machine might complicate its attribution—and the responsibility attached to politically consequential speech.

Three layers of semi-opaque vellum bring together four compliant phrases handwritten in red, a grid for recombining their words, and marks made by a pen plotter. An algorithm selects words to highlight or redact, allowing new expressions to emerge. The machine’s slow movements and sounds make this transformation visible as a physical process. In a live performance, the artist initiated the plotter and departed while it continued writing, foregrounding the tension between mechanical independence and human responsibility.

Exhibited at the Bantam Machine Art Gallery; performed at New York University. Presented at the Open Hardware Summit in Berlin and 4S Making & Doing in Toronto.