Onur Yüce Gün

Model of a Drawing Process: Watercolor-Calculating

About the Project

This project showcases the spatio-temporal model of a specially prepared painting’s emergence process. The painting is prepared using a drawing system (the Broadened Drawing-Scape) that is developed at MIT’s Design and Computation Group. The drawing apparatus helps combine computational image capturing and projection techniques with analog painting processes to implement a computationally broadened, open-ended hand-drawing and painting system. Shape Grammars are used both to generate (calculate and paint) and retrospectively analyze the painting.

The exhibited model reveals the turning points of the genesis of the painting. These moments are represented on transparent surfaces that are assembled in a sequential order. This way, the model becomes a spatio-temporal representation of the unique painting process, allowing the observer to experience the time-space of the watercolor painting. While one half of the model uses original images that are captured during the emergence of the painting, the other half uses computationally re-interpreted (filtered) versions to elucidate both the analog and the digital realms the drawing preexists.

All images then are printed on special inkjet transparency films and then framed using cut-to-size plexiglass sheets. While one of the sheets is thinner to enhance transparency, the other one is thicker to ensure structural stability of the model.

Public Events

Exhibition at the MIT 2016 Open House
Department of Architecture, Long Lounge
Saturday, April 23, 2016

MIT hosted over 40,000 visitors and prospective students at the MIT 2016 Open House celebration. Visitors to the Onur Yüce Gün exhibition showed interest both into the model and the process used in its creation.

About the Artist

Onur Yüce Gün is a graduate of the Design and Computation Group within the MIT Department of Architecture.

This study is a part of Gün’s PhD Dissertation (2016), “A Place for Computing Visual Meaning: The Broadened Drawing-Scape,” and is included in Gün’s dissertation book submitted in May 2016.

Original painting by Joie Chang.