Building an interactive plotter art installation #Art @toThePixel
James Merrill, given the opportunity to participate in SIGGRAPH 2023 in Los Angeles, decided to showcase how art, code, and pen plotters all mesh together. In order to do this, he created an interactive art installation which brought together all three.
Building an interactive art installation requires careful planning and application architecture. In this post, I will explain my decisions and how I arrived at them.
My design goal was simple: A person can walk up, play with a MIDI controller, see a resulting image on a screen, and then send the image to a pen plotter. The plotter draws their unique drawing, and they can take it home and frame it.
I evaluated a few options for input devices. I landed on the Intech Grid series MIDI controllers for their simplicity and modularity. Meant to be snapped together, these controllers offered the correct number of inputs to encourage playful exploration without being overwhelming.
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