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Cyprus College of Art

Acheiropoieta and Automata

Making without hands and machine thinking

August 2021 | Cyprus College of Art, Lempa, Cyprus.

Grampus Heritage and Erasmus+ 2021

A workshop that drew comparisons between traditional thought around icons in Cyprus with contemporary digital image-making, and between early ideas on automata in mythology with contemporary robotics and technological thinking.

Participants were asked to draw sections of wall paintings in a Byzantine church, while we revisited questions of what it means to create without a direct human hand in the digital age, be it through laser-cutting, 3D printing, CNC, or generative adversarial networks.

These drawings were vectorised and programmed into an upright CNC machine, that we built using locally sourced materials and open source software and hardware.