Creating this piece began by questioning my assumptions about how humans and technology collaborate to create art. Humans are often assumed to be the source of creativity, and technology works mindlessly to realize the human’s vision. But technology is inherently just as creative as a person – for example, it is certainly much more creative at guessing random numbers. So, how could I reverse these roles? In my Collaborative Drawing Machine, a person draws lines on a blank canvas, and the machine creatively reimagines these lines as a landscape.

This process embodies collaboration by allowing users to consider non-human agents as creative equals. OpenCV image processing is used to determine the location of the Axidraw head and the line drawn on the paper. The contour is parsed internally, and my algorithm nondeterministically places features such as birds, houses, trees, towers, lakes, and boats upon the contour to turn the lifeless line into a tiny, floating world.