ART WORK
The Joy of YDKEWYGUYGI
LIKE MOST TECHNOLOGIES, MANY EARLY mark-making machines were purely practical, usually addressing the pre-printing-press need for quick and easy copying. The automaton craze of the 18th century produced the first completely mechanical drawing and writing machines, as well as some of the first machines with mechanisms that were as interesting as their outputs. (And sometimes more so!)
Swiss inventor Henri Maillardet made a machine that could produce four different drawings and three poems encoded on a large set of complex cams. It signed its own work by writing “Ecrit par L’Automate de Maillardet” (“Written by Maillardet’s Automaton”) in the border of the final poem — perhaps evidence that even ...
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