About the project
31 generative drawings, a pen-plotter language from 1985, and a non-AI chatbot.
The challenge
Genuary is a community art event: every day in January you make a generative artwork from a given prompt (“one line”, “wallpaper group”, “recursive grids”…). I committed to a single hard constraint for the whole month — everything must be pen-plotter art: lines only, no fills, five fixed inks, output a machine could physically draw.
The engine: LPRINT / TRACE
Instead of drawing directly, each sketch composes a string of plotter commands with
LPRINT() — "M x,y" (move) and "D x,y" (draw) — exactly the
dialect a Canon X-07 micro-computer used to drive a Canon X-710 plotter. TRACE() then
parses that string and replays it with p5.js beginShape()/vertex()/endShape(). The
library comes from v3ga's p5.js
re-coding of Jean-Paul Delahaye's 1985 book
“Dessins géométriques et artistiques avec votre micro-ordinateur” (Eyrolles).
The palettes
Only five two-colour inks are ever used (background → stroke):
- NEW_YELLOW — acid yellow → cobalt blue
- NEW_BLUE — cobalt blue → acid yellow
- RED — sand → oxblood
- GREEN — sea → deep teal
- YELLOW — ochre → navy
The site
Hand-built, no framework. A deliberately loud splash page (homage to webcurios.co.uk), a live gallery where every card runs the real sketch, and a rule-based, non-AI chatbot that can describe any day and will happily tell you its favourite (Day 26, recursive grids).
The zines
Two print pieces accompany the site: a small zine (bio + intro to generative art) and a big saddle-stitched zine — one hand-drawn vector image, all thirty-one raster prints of the drawings, an about-me page, this about-the-project page, and a QR back to the live site.
Jumps to the live gallery — all 31 sketches running in your browser.