Call and Response - Choices

How do patterns start? Where do they begin?

I have been studying drawing pairs - manual/machine diptychs, looking closely at the first mark that the machine makes. More specifically, since all lines are connected and there is in fact only one mark for every drawing, it would be more accurate to say I have been watching the Tiny-Z’s first move, how it leaves the origin to start every drawing.

Sometimes it moves to the far corner of the page to begin the pattern, drawing a dark diagonal line across the space that it will eventually fill with horizontals and verticals. Other times, it starts in the corner closest to “home” - machine coordinates 0,0. And while I could specify a start point in the code, or look at the coordinates to predict where it will go, it is far more enjoyable to be surprised by this first movement. The machine wakes up, hums, and moves quickly to start its task, developing habits. When patterns are similar, it usually picks the same starting point over and over, but sometimes there’s an outlier. If it picks a different starting point, then maybe the patterns aren’t so similar after all, or at the very least, we get to look at them a little differently - freed from perpendicularity. A little more open to interpretation.

Below is a catalogue of these first moves, surprising actions memorialized on paper.

Instance of the Tiny-Z picking the same starting point for two different drawings

Wild card starting points!