Computational Drawing: From Foundational Exercises to Theories of Representation

by Carl Lostritto

Overview

This book explores computation, specifically the craft of writing computer code, as a medium for drawing. 

Exercises, essays, algorithms, diagrams, and drawings are woven together to offer instruction, insight, and theories that are valuable to practicing architects, artists, and scholars. This book can serve as a primer for those new to programming or motivation and context for those with experience. “Computing” and “drawing” are both deeply historical and loaded terms. Although digital media is often positioned in opposition to the “manual” act of drawing, the broader territory of “computing” includes matters of language, rules, procedures, and orders that are very much compatible with the presence of ink on paper. Indeed, the nature of drawing—a temporal medium governed by marks that can be precisely defined, but not easily edited—provides welcome structure for computational methods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781957183459
Publisher:	ORO Editions
Publication date:	12/27/2022
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carl Lostritto is Graduate Program Director and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. He operates an artistic practice that involves writing custom software and adapting machines to create drawings.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 8

Preface 10

Additional Notes for the Beginning Programmer 12

Architecture and Other Disciplines 12

Start 12

Chapter 1 Definitions 15

What drawing is not and what computing cannot do 18

A drawing cannot be edited 20

A computer cannot draw 25

A drawing is not final 28

Misunderstandings about Computing 29

Image Formats in this Book 32

Exercise 1.1 / Coding a mark 33

Exercise 1.2 / Draw from a function library 35

Chapter 2 Structures 79

From Dirty Marks to Lines, Shapes & Representations 79

A Taxonomy of Taxonomies of Lines 90

The existence taxonomy 92

The temporal taxonomy 102

The geometry-material taxonomy 108

The behavior scope taxonomy 110

The auto-what? Taxonomy 114

Exercise 2.1 / One mark, two readings 114

Exercise 2.2 / Line Finder 114

Exercise 2.3 / Line-Maker+Line-Finder+Line-Maker 114

Chapter 3 Strategies 173

From Willful Misuse to Opportunistic Surprise 174

Exercise 3.1 / Re-Code a Common Digital Tool 174

Misplacing Intelligence 178

Exercise 3.3 / Dumb Algorithm 178

The Computational Underlay 182

Exercise 3.4 / Non-Grid Graph Paper 182

Chapter 4 Form 215

Objects and Space / matter and machines 215

Depth & Projection 216

Exercise 4.1 / Automatic Drawing 218

Depth is Inherently Difficult 218

Depth Cues 219

Exercise 4.2 / The depthy line 220

Exercise 4.3 / Pursuit of flatness 220

Objects 221

Surfaces 222

Two and a half dimensional objects and pseudo-spaces 223

The Form of Ink 220

Chapter 5 Futures 277

Still on Paper, Still Difficult, Slower, Longer 279

Craft 280

Drawing Discipline 281

Making and Re-making Technology 282

Appendix 287

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

In a historical moment when pedagogies of drawing and computing are still being debated, this timely contribution identifies, unpacks, and repositions the instrumentality of the tools that underlie varied media. Linking strategies that range from the compositional to the rule-based, Lostritto historicizes these tools, the ideas that precede them, and their results. What surfaces is a refreshing respite from the limiting dichotomies we have all endured in the trenches of curricular debates. Beyond the intellectual precision of the book’s argument, Lostritto’s drawings form an indispensable body of work whose figures and configurations embody, line by line, the evidence through which the instruments of the discipline must manifest that debate.

dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and Principal of NADAAA - Nader Tehrani

"Art meets machinery in Carl Lostritto’s new book Computational Drawing, a five-chapter theory and exercise book on the craft of drawing with computer code. Both instructional and poetic, the book considers the artistry of algorithms by challenging the dichotomous relationship between drawing and computing.... Lostritto’s book reads like a manual for gaining a greater understanding of computer-generated art. It’s written in plain English for architects, artists, and scholars alike, and is divided into exercises, algorithms, essays, and 1:1 representations of pen-plotter drawings."

Nuvo - Ayesha Habib

With acupuncture-like precision, Lostritto unpacks genetic connections between drawing and computing, on the prowl for new visual bodies and alternative forms of knowledge constructions—revelatory insights a double key click or bodily gesture away. Operating in the space between a guidebook and Jorge Luis Borges’ encyclopedic Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, Computational Drawing gathers, dissects, and resplices assumptions about the generative potential of computing and drawing, realigning things taken for granted…

associate professor of Architecture, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning - Perry Kulper