Context
Generated art usually looks generated. Straight lines, clean fills, nothing at stake. The question behind Machinami was whether code could draw a Japanese shopfront street that looked made by hand, never ran out, could be rebuilt from a single number, and could then be handed to a pen plotter and drawn for real. It started from a short video of a hand drawn taiyaki shop and an open source generator of endless ink landscapes. It borrowed the look of one and the technique of the other.
What was built
Machinami is one HTML file. It draws an endless street in SVG, with no images, from a six digit street number. The number decides everything: which of six kinds each building is, whether a shop, a restaurant, a house, a bathhouse, a storehouse or a small shrine, along with its size, palette, signs and name, the cherry trees and vending machines out front, even where the telephone poles stand. Lines wobble and fills sit slightly off their outlines to get the woodblock look. A second program reads the drawing back from the page, removes hidden lines, hatches the dark areas and writes a millimeter accurate file, one layer per pen, for an AxiDraw pen plotter, along with the exact commands to run it. Visitors can type any number to visit a street, or share one as a link.
What was learned
A seed only means something for one version of the code, because the random numbers are drawn in order. Add one decision and every street changes, so the piece is versioned. A screen drawing also lies to a pen: fills hide lines on screen, but a pen draws every one, so the hard part of the plotter export was hidden line removal, not plotting. And the instructions are a prototype too. The first set failed on a real Mac in three different ways. The full story, with how the seed math works and what broke, is in the case study.
Credits
Technique after shan-shui-inf by LingDong- (MIT). Style after bodam.sketch's taiyaki shop. Shippori Mincho and Yuji Syuku are used under the SIL Open Font License.