Tropic of Charlie
“The world of images controls the world of matter.”
- Christopher Alexander
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Revisiting Algorithmic Representation
Drawing 03
Introduction
Following up on a previous post titled, Algorithmic Representation, and in dialog with Reflecting on the Pilot G-2 07, I have finally, reopened and refined my algorithmic drawing script to make sense of the myriad approaches I’d developed over the past few years. There are many reasons why I began this journey, of digitalizing my hand drawn process, but I don’t think any of the reasons I started with are the reasons I’m still working on it today.
Original Rationale
“A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It's supposed to be a door.”
― Fran Lebowitz in Pretend it’s a City1
I developed this algorthimic representation script, originally, to take my ideas about drawing and automate them, to produce control nets I could feed to an AI that would serve as abstract spatial environments it could grapple with as it attempts to hang all of humanity’s preconceived notions about cities, urbanisms, and distopias upon it. The reconciliation here, or lack thereof, might then reveal some interesting quirks around how we think about and understand urbanism, as well as ourselves, but I think the necessity to draw these control nets, rather than taking images/renders of a 3d model space weakened this approach. I think this particular process didn’t quite feel right because, to reference the Fran Lebowitz quote above, it was ultimately creating a mirror, rather than a door to another place.1
Current Hypothesis
But I think the process of shelving this angle a couple years ago and dusting it off has revealed some key hypotheses and direction. And it was listening to episode 4 season 16 of the Dissect Podcast on Daft Punk that it hit me what I was doing with my hand drawing, versus my algorthimic drawing.2 I realized my alogrithmic drawing was embodying the spirit of my drawing, rather than the style of my drawings, they look different on the surface, but the underlying intent is the same.3
My drawings, digital or by hand, are studies doing exactly what Tropic of Charlie has been about: exploring “ a place, yet to be built.” They are both of the same spirit: trying to provide a door to somewhere else, while the difference between the two is just style, the flourish, and trying to match them up is tangential to the objective of both media.
Algorithmic Drawing Progress
So how is this process manifesting itself in the work today?
See some examples below:
Here I’m doing my first direct hand drawn to digital translation I’ve done in a couple years. You can see the distortion that takes place as I attempt to rationalize my fabricated perspective into a digital persective of a rational three dimensional space. Obviously there is a bunch of room for refinement, but you get a general idea of whats going on.
This next attempt reveals just how much trouble the perspectival lense can give you as you realize that the three dimensional space doesn’t look anything like the space I thought I was drawing. But similarly, the post productive tweaks I’m making on the drawing level also embrace this distortion. Scale of elements is often independent of actual location, and instead dependent on the relative distance. My scale figures also desperately need refinement, so we’ll have to work on that too at some point.
The drawings don’t exit the algorithm flawlessly, a fair amount of two dimensional post-productive iterations must be employed to clean these up, here I’m really just isolating iterations to get the best version of category of element. This is by no means a long or intensive step, it’s still only going to get you so far before manual post-production would be necessary.
The hardest thing to keep straight is the underlying objective. You are trying to take quick broad strokes at speculating into a spatial composition. It’s not a hand drawing, it’s not supposed to fill space, it is supposed to provide just enough articulation that you, the viewer, can imagine abstractly what this might be, and fill it in with your imagination.
Conclusion
These emerging algorithmic drawings lack a bunch of detail and intentionality, but effectively map a particular assemblage of elements. They do something other than boost for a strange new resitutation of our urban environment and experience: they act as control nets. But instead of taking these directly to AI, what if we dial back and think of these drawings as control nets for human intelligence - our intelligence? I’m not trying to dictate/prescribe the interpretation by the subject, rather I’m are attempting to produce apparatuses upon which people can introduce and imagine their own architectural and urban conception of these spaces.
Endnotes
2 Cuchna, Cole. “‘One More Time’/ ‘Aerodynamic’ by Daft Punk.” Episode. Dissect 16, no. 4, 2026. https://open.spotify.com/episode/79Wkjz3wL6qC0VEpX8vtbB.
3 Cuchna, Cole. “‘One More Time’/’Aerodynamic’ by Daft Punk.”