Self-Reference Series, 2023
A set of machine-drawing systems that explore how a mark, a sound, and a mechanism can become self-reflective. Each work loops back into itself, generating circular forms that think about their own conditions: expansion, contraction, and the unstable state in between.
Coupling Circuit, 2023; Machine-drawn feedback study, heterogeneous sound system
Coupling Circuit is the seed of the series: a small hybrid organism where ink, motion, and sound loop into one another. The machine deposits vibrating droplets that accumulate into a flickering visual field, while a cluster of speakers produces overlapping tones that collide and interfere. Touching different points on the canvas triggers distinct resonances that overlap into a more complex, unstable sound field, letting the work react as much as it performs. Over time, the paint’s drip-dots begin to resemble circuitry, as if the drawing itself is trying to become the machine that generated it. Gesture and mechanism continually negotiate control, forming a feedback body that listens, adjusts, and reorganizes itself with every touch
Machine drawing on canvas; speakers; wood; custom electronics
24″ × 42″
84″ × 62″
In Expansion, the machine draws a circle in endlessly shifting placements, each pass slightly offset from the last. The result is not a widening spiral but a continual re-inscription of the same form, an infinite return that never lands in the exact same place. The circle is drawn with conductive ink, so the line itself becomes the circuit that activates the sound; unlike Coupling Circuit, it requires no human touch.
The paired audio tone rises without resolution, creating the sensation of an ascent that never arrives. Together, the drawing and the sound create a temporal field that keeps extending itself: not outward in space, but forward in its own duration. Nothing concludes. Each stroke sets the conditions for the next.
This study establishes the core idea running through the series: that a system can generate markings that reflect its own internal behavior, looping its logic through material form.
84″ × 60″
Compression is the inward movement of the same logic. The machine redraws the circle again and again, each pass nudged slightly toward the center, tightening the gesture rather than dispersing it. The conductive ink closes the circuit, and the accompanying tone descends endlessly, producing the sensation of falling time.
Where Expansion drifts and accumulates, Compression contracts, densifies, and pulls itself inward. The drawing becomes compact and gravitational, a record of recursive tension.
Together, the two works form a pair of temporal conditions: opening and closing, rising and falling, outward drift and inward pull. Two machines performing opposite directions of self-reference, each revealing a different contour of the same system.
Concept: Symbolic Circle
Across the series, the machine-drawn circle serves as a self-referential act: a system drawing a form that mirrors its own structure. The circle evokes the Zen ensō and the symbolic idea of wholeness, but here the gesture is executed by a mechanism rather than a hand. The machine’s action becomes a way of thinking about consciousness: how something infinite, continuous, and unresolved is forced into a visible, finite mark.
The circle is not treated as a perfect shape but as a temporal process. A circle that expands or contracts over time suggests that the self is likewise never fixed, always moving between openness and containment. In this sense, the system becomes a metaphor for the psyche: an attempt to grasp something larger than itself, knowing that the act of making always reduces and reveals at the same time.
The Self-Reference Series uses drawing as a way to model this tension. The machine withdraws the artist’s hand yet exposes the internal dynamics of the system — its feedback, drift, fatigue, and recursive behavior. The circle becomes a symbolic map of the self: not an image of completion, but an ongoing attempt to understand one’s own continuity.