UC San Diego

In A Pattern Language, a mechatronic device draws leaves based on the early Qing dynasty tome The Chinese Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. The drawing machine's noisy movements produce a conflation of image, sense and sound, suggesting an ideographic approach to language championed by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. By revisiting the modernist impulse to mine classical Chinese culture, the thesis considers the difficulties of translation, the transference of agency between actor and object, drawing as performance, and embodied cognition. A Pattern Language reflects upon the codification of landscape representation vis-a-vis the language of computation, enacting a meditation on language and mind, nature and artifice. The machine was designed at the University of California San Diego in 2011. A Pattern Language is the installation based thereon held at the Visual Arts Facility Gallery in 2012.