My previous drawing robots have a very simple mechansim for holding markers—either a series of holes on Minus E or a tube on Scribbot. There was also no lifting mechanism, as my robots’ scribbly drawing style did not require it. This year, inspired by the pen-holding mechansim on pen plotters, I decided to add a similar mechansim to my drawing robot.

In my past code sketches, I have created patterns in various forms. Most of the time, the patterns were formed simply by repeating the same visual. In a recent class, Tega gave us a systematic overview of different approaches to make patterns. It was mind blowing to see how extensively people have studied patterns. In particular, I was very much drawn into Truchet tiles.

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Banner Depot 2000 is an interactive archive of over 20,000 banner ads from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The authors of this project, Richard Lewei Huang and Yufeng Zhao, published a dataset of these banner ads. This project brings out so much nostalgia of my early memories of the Internet and I have been meaning to make a project using this dataset.

In the past three years, as a part of my ongoing research, I have created well over 1000 computational sketches, in the forms of still images, short animations, and interactive visuals. I have always wanted to experiment more with analog mediums as I am curious about how visuals that are usually shown on digital screens will render on analog mediums. This fall, I am taking Tega Brain’s Print and Code at NYU’s Integrated Design & Media program, where I learned techniques of risograph printing. I decided to turn three videos of my past sketches, each representing a distinct style of my work, into risograph animations.

At ITP, I took a class called Paper Enginnering and Interactive Play with Sam Ita. I was very excited to experiment with paper. Paper is such a ubiquitous medium, yet often overlooked.

Back in 2017, I built my first mobile drawing robot for my undergraduate capstone at NYU Shanghai. Some of my design choices at the time were constrained by the resources and timeline. Now that I am back in school, pursing my master’s degree, I wanted to redesign the robot. My main goal was to make the robot smaller so it becomes more portable. I also thought this would be a nice challenge to practice my CAD skills and deepen my understanding of the electronics.

Inspired by 18th-century automatons such as the writer and the draughtsman by Jaquet-Droz, I wanted to create my own drawing automatons. In particular, I am hoping to build more accessible drawing automatons with a focus on enhanced programmability. As a first step, I decided to design a mechansim for drawing scribbly lines.

Yaogu, also known as the Waist Drum dance, is a traditional folk dance popular in my hometown region of Northern Shaanxi, China. Having lived away from my hometown for over a decade, I wanted to create something that would remind me of my fonding memories there.

A series of photographs of abstract straight lines formed by lights and shadows.

A duo of acrylic paintings of eyes of my father and my mother.

A graphite drawing based on a photograph of myself that I took in Washinton DC.