Watch Wind-Up Toys And Walkmen Create Intricate Mechanical Drawings

Watch Wind-Up Toys And Walkmen Create Intricate Mechanical Drawings

Art can happen where you least expect it, which is definitely the case with the work of Echo Yang, who uses small toys and everyday electronics to create detailed drawings.

Yang is a student of information design at Design Academy Eindhoven. In an effort to put a twist on the trend of generative design based on algorithms, Yang employed semi-obsolete mechanical objects like electric razors, Walkmen and alarm clocks to see what kind of visualisations they could create. The series is called Autonomous Machines.

Here are some videos of each drawing being made:

This process-oriented project falls into a long history of chance aesthetics in art, whereby the artist cedes control of certain variables in the creative process. The most famous example is the Dada artist Jean Arp, who tore up coloured paper and dropped the pieces onto canvas, where he pasted them down to form his composition. Such ideas are present in a great deal of work by modern artists, from Jackson Pollock to John Cage.

Yang’s work extends this philosophy to the repeated analogue movements of our everyday mechanical gadgetry. The results are pretty amazing, and really make you realise that there is beauty to be found all over. [This Is Colossal]


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