Motherboard

Dorkbot is global collective of people doing strange (and awesome) things with electricity. Each month people gather to share their newest experiments with an eager audience. This month composer Jeff Snyder (also responsible for the Manta controller) presented his Pen Plotter Projects which give old and hidden technologies a new purpose.

I checked in with Jeff to learn about his adventures with an old pen plotter, a homemade analog synth, and lots of white circuitboard to draw frequencies (which for now remain in the inaudible range) and etch landscapes.

MB: The reappropriation of old electronics/technologies is great. How did you get into that?

JS: I find older technologies interesting. Things like pen plotters are generally before my time, since I wasn’t really doing architecture or engineering when I was 9 years old. In that way, they have a different approach to solving technical hurdles than an engineer developing a product today might take. Things that seem inefficient now were really the best way to do things at the time.

Also, I like how ‘dead’ technology doesn’t continually change, so it’s more inviting to explore the internal workings and possibilities without the fear that it will be irrelevant in the future—it’s already irrelevant! Another part of it is my delight in the mechanical, and many earlier devices have much more exposed and accessible inner workings when compared to current-day technologies with tiny surface mount components and inaccessible rights-protected digital microcontroller code.

Jeff presenting at Dorkbot

What do you learn specifically from doing a project like the pen plotter?

Well, mostly a lot of useless details. I learned that it’s hard to find a plastic bin to etch large circuitboards. I learned to wear rubber gloves when I drill holes in plotter pens and fill them with permanent ink. I learned that a lot of the sounds that are interesting in the audio frequency range on a modular synthesizer do not necessarily make interesting visual patterns, while a lot of sounds that are relatively boring in the audio range make very beautiful and complex drawings. I learned a little bit about python in using the Chiplotle library (python is a programming language that Chiplotle uses). And I learned that very busy or complicated landscape photos do not etch very well.

Is there something lost in analog vs digital—or—in 20 years will someone be doing something similar to your work with pen plotter and analog synth (I love that the pen-plotter can’t handle higher frequencies and freaks out, it’s an odd little feature, are techs today similarly easy or as fun to mess around with)?

Good question. I am highly interested in both analog and digital technologies. These two plotter projects include both sides of that coin—one uses an ‘analog’ plotter, the other uses a ‘digital’ one. But those names really just mean that the input format for the plotters is analog or digital (one takes an analog voltage, the other a stream of bits over a serial port). In a sense, the output of both plotters is “analog” in that it moves a pen around a page, and therefore winds up with continuous output—the pen will draw a continuous line between two points, not a set of discrete points on a grid.

And the output of every digital system is analog in a way, like how when you play a CD it comes out a speaker, the cone of which can only move in and out in a continuous line, and is therefore an analog device.That being said, a digital point in the signal chain tends to lend the ability for precise control, while analog points in a signal chain can often produce interesting results when malfunctioning. This is borne out in the way the analog plotter drawings allow very little direct control from me. Any phase or frequency misalignment in the oscillators that are generating the drawing will cause the drawing to continually change as the relationships drift. I find that interesting.

Checking out a circuitboard

Also, extreme inputs can create interesting results, like the violent motion of the pen when an out-of-range voltage is input. On the digital plotter, an out-of-range value simply results in the lighting of an error LED. However, it would be incredibly difficult to figure out a way to make the analog plotter draw detailed landscapes the way the digital plotter can. When I’m doing the landscapes, it’s really fun to enter a photo in Photoshop, mess with the colors, output it to Illustrator where I trace it, output it to a postscript file, convert that to HPGL, and then edit the HPGL file to get exactly what I want. In that process, I have a high degree of control and precision which is satisfying and can produce super-human results that I find aesthetically rewarding.

The circuitboards are a great project bringing out something usually hidden behind a shell, and doing something new. Can you briefly go over this ‘reformatting’ of the boards?

I was etching circuitboards at home for my own electrical designs, and I thought, “Hey, why not etch pictures on these boards instead of just circuit trace”‘? So I experimented with circuitboard production method as a medium for visual art. I think it’s conceptually intriguing, because circuitboards are traditionally only a functional, non-decorative, hidden technology. You don’t see them, usually, unless you take something apart. Often, I take things apart and find the circuitboards very attractive, like tiny cities. Usually the board material one uses for this process is an ugly yellow, so when I decided I wanted to focus on the aesthetic properties, I had to find some boards where I found the material more beautiful.

Circuitboard landscape

Both of your projects seemed to relate to the beauty and manipulation of machines that people don’t usually see or want to experiment with. What’s going on in there?

Well my engineer side is usually interested in finding out how things actually work, and how the various problems the designer encountered were solved. Opening up any product will tell a story of challenges overcome (or succumbed to in the case of poor design). Why did they put this here? Oh, it’s because they needed to take the mechanical stress off this piece. But why is that piece there? Oh because otherwise this would turn too fast… I learn a lot from taking things apart. It’s fun to get inside, though, or even just to think about how to use things for ways they weren’t intended.

Dorkbot NYC meets the first Wednesday of every month. Check the Dorkbot site to see if there’s people doing strange things with electricity in your city.