A lot of amazing projects made their debut at Milan Design Week, and amongst the most impressive was the “Drawing Machine” conceived and built by Danish designer Eske Rex. Comprised of two nine-foot-tall triangular structures and the flat drawing surface between them, the machine makes drawings with a single pen held at the end of two long arms connected to weighted pendulums. The pendulums move the pen around in circles that vary in size depending on how much weight is placed on them. More weight is harder to pull and thus makes smaller circles while less weight yields larger shapes. If you stack each pendulum with equal weight you get a perfect circle, and if you disperse the weight unevenly you get a lopsided form.
Once set in motion the pendulums move back and forth endlessly, spurred on by the transference of their kinetic energy. During Milan Design Week, Rex let the machine run all day long, stopping it only to replace the pens when they ran out. As you can see from the pictures below, a day’s worth of one continuous shape renders a decidedly erogenous image, whereas if you were to change the weight distribution throughout the process you’d get something more geometric.