I had a Spirograph as a kid, the plastic one with the toothed wheels and the rings. I drop a pen into one of those little holes and push the wheel around the inside of a ring, and it swirls around and around until a flower of loops comes out that I did not draw and could not have drawn on my own. It's an amazing machine that does one thing. And it does that one thing beautifully well. I wanted to see if I could build that in a browser, and understand a little bit more about how it worked.
Then I went to MoMA. I got stuck in front of the Pollocks, thinking less about the paintings than about the making of them, which looks like the most fun anybody has ever had at work. There was paint on the floor, a stick, a can, and an arm. I already rebuilt Duchamp's spinning discs, and I wanted to see what I could do with Pollock.
So I made the Pollock thing, and it was okay. The flicking of my finger across the art doesn't give me a real visceral feel, the way I wanted it to. But it's fine.
What got me unstuck was Toy Story Mania at Disney World. You sit in a car with a shooter in your lap, pull the string, and fling something across the room at a target that is already moving. Your hands are barely doing anything, and it still feels like throwing, because whatever you launched has to travel and the target will not wait for it. That became the Splatter Booth. A disc spins, you press the screen, paint crosses the gap, and the spin decides where it lands. Once the target was moving, the rest opened up, since a nozzle can be a tight jet or a wide fan or a fine haze and each one writes differently on a turning surface.
They're all versions of the same thing. Doing something simple, and the machine holds together, and makes art. Here's what I made.
The plastic ring and the toothed wheel, rebuilt. Pin a ring, drop the pen into one of the numbered holes, and the wheel rolls until the tooth count brings the line back to where it started. Ink multiplies where the passes cross, so the lace darkens at every intersection the way a ballpoint does on real paper. Turn the paper a few degrees between passes and the patterns interfere into a mandala.
Pick a ring, a wheel, and a pen hole, then press Draw. Settings holds the pen types, the paper colour, and the turn per pass.
Run the 63 wheel inside the standard ring with the pen at hole 1, then draw it again at eight degrees of paper turn and let the second pass weave through the first.
A disc turning fast and a hose pointed up at it. Press the screen and the paint crosses the gap on its own time, and where it lands depends on how far the disc has moved by the time it gets there. A fine mist sticks where it hits. A heavy glob cannot hold on, and the spin drags it backwards and throws it out toward the rim in a tail of thrown droplets.
Press and hold anywhere on the screen to shoot. The star up top opens the nozzles, the spin, the paints, and the physics.
Set the spin high and the nozzle to jet, then hold one steady line out at the rim and let the rotation drag it into a spiral you never drew.
A can of paint and a floor. Drag slowly and the paint dribbles out in a thin ribbon that follows your hand. Whip the cursor and the load lets go in mid-air, arcing out and landing as a spray of drops that keep the direction of the throw. The stick never touches the canvas, so every line is something gravity and momentum wrote for you.
Drag to dribble and whip to fling. The star up top opens the palettes, the floor, the paint, and Auto-Pollock.
Load up, whip across the whole canvas in one long arc, and watch where the drops thin out at the end of the throw.