Introduction

One Year and Six Months

One Year and Seven Months

One Year and Eight Months

One Year and Nine Months

One Year and Ten Months

Two Years and Four Months

A human baby goes from one moment of pure unmitigated wonder and limitless surprise to the next in a chain-reaction of epiphanies. Psychology describes the development of a human child into an image-maker as a predictable, slightly boring, pre-preprogrammed ascent from uncontrolled motor-muscular instinct on first contact to cognitively determined representation and symbolization on the adult finish-line. This, misanthropically, misses the point of the human experience. The curve is not followed, nor is it created, the approximated uniformity is a mirage. All children are different. It is the adults who are bland, predictable and driven to conformity, and their analytic tools are designed to find these 'qualities' in other minds as well. By concentrating on what the child gains as s/he gets older, evermore firmer command over the medium (which is a form of decadence), that what is lost is ignored: a total absence of snobbery and a never-again recuperated power of direct observation.

MyDaughter Sjaantje started to put wax crayons to surfaces two weeks before she turned one-and-a-half. A new door of research had opened for her! And I, HerFather, jealously, wants to join her on her quest. Together we are now creating the Synthethic Sjaantje Drawing Machine. Month by month we will publish her original drawings as well as drawings generated from them by the machine. The aim of the Synthethic Sjaantje Drawing Machine is not to create drawings in her style, but to generate drawings from them that will explore what is inside the originals. By mixing, manipulating and rebuilding the originals the Synthethic Sjaantje Drawing Machine will turn her input-drawings inside out and pronounce with liberating absence of intent what was only implicit.

A great work of art needs a lifetime of sole devotion to be fully understood. I do not know if this is true, but it is what James Joyce claimed to be the case for his Ulysses. But only children, at least for their parents, achieve what art demands: a full and unwavering obsession (paranoid, but blissful) with every tiny detail. Only a fool would not try to get the most out of it before they grow up too old and start sniffing glue.

One Year and Six Months (September 2009).

Image 1.1

Sjaantje clearly enjoys drawing with wax crayons, eagerly pointing to the Paddington Bear tincan that holds them, when she sees it. The interest in the actual drawing lasts for 5 seconds at best, after which the crayons themselves have more play value. This is her first drawing with the computer using Microsoft Paint. I think she understood there was some relation between her hands and the pen on the screen but that she does not understand the exact nature of the relationship. Sjaantje enjoys banging on the keyboard, especially the space-bar, probably because when doing so the palm of her hands are on the touchpad causing the pen on the screen to move. Image 1.1 is her first ever computer drawing, executed in Microsoft Paint.


image 1.2


image 1.3

Image 1.2 and 1.3 are Sjaantje's first and second drawing for the Synthetic Sjaantje Drawing Machine.


image 1.4

Image 1.4 shows a collection of drawings generated by taking small segments from input-drawings 1.2 and 1.3 and refactoring them into one line-drawing.

One Year and Seven Months (October 2009).


image 2.1

MyDaughter's current drawings on paper are executed with slightly more focus than before. They also take double the time, ten seconds instead of the five she needed the month before. She also puts more pressure on the crayon and her lines are now harder but still touch lightly on the surface, as image 2.1 shows.


image 2.2

Whenever I put MyDaughter on my lap, behind the laptop, with the Drawings Machine active, she shows the excited smile of a play-face. Especially when I show her how the line grows while moving my finger across the touchpad. And she has indeed, at first as if by accident, fingered with intent doodles to the screen! Her interaction with the computer remain very short before she irrevocably moves on to the keyboard or the laptop itself (a recent development I am not very pleased with). Her first two drawings quickly ran away from the drawing canvas, something which also happens when drawing on paper. Image 2.2 is a composite of these two attempts. The program however does record the mouse as it moves out of sight beyond the application. Image 2.3 shows the drawing beyond the drawing.

image 2.3


image 2.4

Images 2.4 is a composite of all Sjaantje's drawings this month. Images 2.5 is generated, like image 1.4, by taking random fragments from the drawings in 2.4 and drawing them as one line.


image 2.5

One Year and Eight Months (November 2009).

For MyDaugther's developing brain this month was a language month: she has been absorbing new words at breakneck-speed, she has started to experimentally connect words to express more complex desires. The number of words she now uses has grown at least tenfold compared to her vocabulary a month ago and her language comprehension has grown even more. In accord with the theory that the laws of language mimic the structure of our narrative-seeking and narrative-creating conciousness, her understanding and appreciation of picture books, stories and TV-programmes has also improved spectacularly. Everyday day she sees familiar things, like her Maisy DVD, as if for the first time. As a consequence of all this activity she has shown less interest in other activities, like drawing. Her crayons she now prefers to eat (or at least chew on) and she has not repeated her computer drawings of last month. She will still point happily at the pen on the screen but has, temporarily, lost what is causing it. The drawings done this month are therefore semi-random results of her exploring keyboard-interactivity (ho-hum). She is now also banging on the keyboard with both hands flat-down, which makes me worry. I do believe however she is attempting to make the pen on the screen move.


image 3.1

The Synthetic Sjaantje Drawing Machine can now calculate/draw the shortest path between two given points by stitching together segments of drawings by Sjaantje. The process itself is non-random. Image 3.1 shows a number of drawings in which the lines are connecting 10 randomly selected points. This technique is inspired by what Romanian Surrealist Dolfi Trost called 'entoptic graphomania'.


image 3.2

The graphomania-function creates the possibility to redraw a Sjaantje drawing using the drawing itself. The resulting drawing can than be redrawn again using the original drawing, and so on into ever deepening recursive rococo, see image 3.2 for an example.


image 3.3

A vaguely interesting result using the machine's graphomanic ability can be obtained by shuffling the points of the original drawing before finding/drawing their new order. The generated drawings, image 3.3, results in a kind of feedback dub from which the original line (drawn in red) can be deducted. The overall pattern is roughly the same for all drawings and all that the introduced randomness does is create background noise to a redundant form.


image 3.4

Image 3.4, like images 1.4 and 2.5 is generated from the sum total of drawings of this month.

One Year and Nine Months (December 2009).


image 4.1, 4.2, 4.3.


Even though it was dirt-cheap, Sjaantje's new magnetic drawing board, a Sinterklaas present, is great fun. For MyDaughter as well as for HerFather. She picks it up constantly and makes many consecutive drawings in one sitting. No pressure needs to be mounted on the stylus for it to draw, and because of this the lines come out sharp and crisp. MyDaughter understood that she could erase the drawing by moving the orange slider almost instantly (see image 4.3) and she has knows precisely when she wants to start with a blank canvas.



image 4.4, 4.5, 4.6.

The magneto-medium suits her perfectly, and on the very first day she started to try out different ways to interact with it. She will often start to draw with immense concentration (image 4.5), beautiful curly lines and open shapes, sometimes she will erase this structure but more often she will continue to fill the drawing-space with frantic zigzag lines in all directions. Most drawings are made with a continues line but sometimes, very deliberately, she uses the stylus to scratch the screen (image 4.6). She says things ("ten", "cat") before drawing on an empty canvas as if informing us about what she is going to draw next but I do not know if she does indeed proceeds to try to draw those things. At one time she created the nose of Lucy Cousins' Maisy by happenstance and she said "Mouse" in recognition. I saw it too. Unfortunately I did not manage to make a photo.


image 4.7

MyDaughter's playtime on the magnetic drawing board constitutes her first real drawings, and I think the accessibility of the medium helped her to become more aware of the potential of drawing in general. Mydaughter's crayon and feltpen drawings show more variety. It is only now that she stopped eating them the she can make use of feltpens (Images 4.10, 4.11, 4.12). And, more important to this project, she has made her first real drawing on the computer (image 4.7).


image 4.8

The visual effect of image 4.7 is remarkably different from previous drawings and it shows consistency with the vertical fan patterns she makes in her other drawings (image 4.1, 4.12). Machine amplification of these drawings (see image 4.8, made like images 1.4, 2.5 and 3.4) stress this strong tendency towards verticality, but the horizontal connection-lines are the real eye-catchers here.


image 4.9

Cubomania is a Surrealist technique in which an image is cut down to a number of squares and shuffled back into the original format at random. A task highly suited to the computer. Because it deals with points, not lines, the cubomaniac tearing apart appears to return less than what is in the original. But, a little feedback will generate maniacal cubes in a few extra steps, as in image 4.9. There are cubes everywhere.






image 4.10, 4.11, 4.12

Image 4.10 is premarked with a square to see if MyDaughter adjusts her actions: this has been tried several times and every time she began to draw inside of the square before moving outside it. This is also the case for drawing chimpanzees. Image 4.12 shows her prefectly closing the loop. Then she preceded to draw two lines in its centre. A nose? The heart-shape on top was made last.

All drawings made by children are wonderful because of their in-your-face expressiveness: they all communicate a keen presence of intelligence and awareness. These computer drawings, untouched and without graphic manipulation, strip this away and it leaves these drawings naked, cold and unemotional. Just as they should be.

One Year and Ten Months (Januari 2010).

The more you look, the more you find. The best place to make discoveries is in your own back garden (I heard on TV). We live in permanent underestimation of everything, especially of the mundane. What Wisdom my dear friends! In relation to 'MyDaughter Sjaantje Draws and the Synthetic Sjaantje Drawing Machine' this might be a good time to quote from Seed Magazine's interview with Alison Gopnik:

"Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both."

"The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are."

Imagination is ambitious but without guarantees of success, reality has the authority of fact even when it is a dismal failure. In the the domain of drawing I take Gopnik's conclusion to mean that small children are not unable to draw like adults (the supposedly end goal) because it is impossible for them physically or mentally but concentrationally: they are unable to stick to the facts. MyDaughter's imagination drifts away second after second, blown away by the stormy winds of entanglement, and there she goes into faraway doodle-lands were no adult are permitted.


image 5.1


image 5.2


image 5.3

Image 5.1 and 5.2 were created by MyDaugther Sjaantje with full awareness of what she was doing. They were made slowly, deliberately and with an eye for what she wanted to achieve. Putting them through the chopping-algorithm (see images 1.4, 2.5, 3.4 and 4.8) something peculiar comes to the surface (see image 5.3), these lines have very limited content. They do not contain the proper angles for the generated drawings to be able to reach all corners. For a second I thought the algorithm was broken, but no, the image itself was the cause.

These two drawings are all MyDaughter drew on the computer this month. Illness was one factor, a general sense of 'I won't do what you tell me' another. At several other times, sitting behind the computer with MyDaughter, she seemed to know very well what I hoped she would do, and she did draw a little but uninspiredly so. The magnetic drawing board that riveted her attention last month (see image 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3.) she has thrown on her toy scrap-yard.






image 5.4, 5.5, 5.6




image 5.6, 5.7

MyDaughter drawings with felt pen have been wonderful this month, though even here her drive to create and explore was not as strong as last month. The first two images (image 5.4, 5.5) do display more clarity and variety. Most interesting is image 5.6, 'Cat, Cat' MyDaughter purred when starting to draw it. When asked after finishing where the eyes were she proceeded to draw the six dots on the right-end of the paper, not at some random location but very targeted because this is were they belong. HerFather does believe she draw a cat but one that touches on the n-dimensional spaces of cathood beyond adult sensitivity.

What I have proceeded to do is to redraw image 5.6 in the drawing machine (image 5.7); this image in turn was redrawn using the tracing technique described earlier (image 3.1, 3.2) using a file collecting all Sjaantje's drawings so far, to draw from. Image 5.8 is the somewhat arcane result, the machine was expected to do a lot better, & that is where I will conclude this month's report.

Two Years and Four Months (July 2010).








image 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4

A Synthetic Sjaantje Drawing Machine update after six months of silence... The first planned update was missed because Sjaantje was down with ear infection, the second one because of preparations for an upcoming event, the third one was missed because of this event: Sjaantje became the big sister of a baby boy and after that her sleep-deprived HerFather stopped counting. But it would be unfair to say that the presence of a new baby, who "assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion" (William James), is the only reason why further use and development of the Drawing Machine has lagged behind. Just when it seemed she began to put touchpad and cursor together as one unit of action/reaction she was overcome by blank canvas ennui; she didn't even want to be behind the screen, she largely refused to draw on empty paper. Instead she asked for 'mouse' and 'maisy' and 'elephant' and 'crocodile' to be drawn for her. Images 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4 are a few examples of MyDaughter's drawings from the last months. But colouring books (see image 6.5) are her new found love when it comes to art, her strokes focus on the heads.


image 6.5




image 6.6, 6.7

On a summery (read: blazing hot) afternoon when Sjaantje was in a good mood we took a seat behind the laptop, opened the Machine, reminded her of the touchpad and the lines and the screen and there she went without looking back. Image 6.6 collects two drawings that are visually unexciting but as a momentum of computer literacy it is her own E=MC2. She was smiling, subdued but keenly, as she enjoyed understanding the relationship. The result is not a drawing but a motor-muscular sensation, up-and-down-and-up-and-down-and-up-and-down. Image 6.7, made four days later shows another breakthrough; tentative but controlled, a star is being born.


image 6.8


image 6.9

The entoptic graphomania function (see image 3.1), that recombines segments of an input-drawing to close a path between random points, works really well with image 6.6 (resulting in image 6.8) and image 6.7 (resulting in image 6.9).


image 6.10

The griddify function resets all point in an area of a given size to one coordinate point with an attractive result, as seen in image 6.10 which zooms out of an aggregate of images 6.6 and 6.7. Image 6.11 uses the chopping-algorithm (see images 1.4, 2.5, 3.4, 4.8, 5.3) on the griddified lines also used for image 6.10.


image 6.11

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