Abstract

Machine Art Language: drawingWriting() as a Practice of Machine Relation

This practice-based PhD investigates how relation between artist and machine can be sustained, perceived, and shaped through attuned collaboration. Centred on drawingWriting-a hybrid method where language and mark-making intertwine-it develops MAL - a speculative environment in which drawing, writing and making emerge through shared gestures of automation, intention, and embodied constraint.

The research approaches attunement as a disciplined form of working-with, a practice of correspondence between human and machine. It attends to the shifting relation between analogue and digital, cognition and code, intention and execution. Through iterative acts of drawing, writing, and responding, the work explores how these distinct agencies can move together in rhythm, maintaining proximity without fusion or resolution.

It asks:

What does it mean to attune to a machine that cannot feel?

How can attention and responsiveness generate a practice grounded in co-agency rather than control?

What kinds of knowledge become possible when process, not outcome, is the shared site of negotiation?

The project enacts, rather than represents, the tension and potential of human–machine relation. It contributes to practice-based research in fine art and to wider debates on authorship, digital co-creation, and the ethics of relational systems.

Jan 2026