Machine Drawings
Automatic, Algoristic, AI-assisted plotter drawings

2002--
Overview

“Confinement Spaces” a series of projects by Patrick Lichty, the result of challenges brought on by the COVID-19 virus, in which the artist responded to differing stages of restriction in space and time. During its production, I scanned over 80 different spaces, generated nearly an hour of video, and rendered hundreds of large-scale computer-generated images.

 

This interactive space commissioned by Nation 2.0 is the first of the records to be shown from the initial days of the pandemic. Patrick created existential “indices” of the places he has inhabited during March-August 2020 by making 3d scans with them with his phone. 

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I started the process by walking around his first space of confinement (<1km of his apartment), taking casual 3D scans of the landscapes, waiting in the early anxious days of the pandemic.  The result was a set of videos of fractured, faceted spaces surrounded by an absence – of everything, leaving a metaphor for his own existential state.
 

As time went on, travel limitations between cities were lifted, I expanded the sphere of confinement, visiting Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Cultural Foundation. Some of the scans that resulted were ghostlike, as if the world before had partially ceased to exist.  This was a viral Lascaux, seeing shadows of history play out in his virtual/physical liminal space.

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Within a couple months, I was able to travel into the rest of the UAE for 48 hours at a time, creating another expansion of his space of confinement, capturing areas near Al Madam (Sharjah), Umm Al Quwain, and Deira and Al Quoz in Dubai. The conceit for this as metaphor was that the notion of confinement was extended to these places and was a reaching out for the universality of the experience, as a representation of the world under the pandemic.

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The 3D models of these captured places are collaged, and re-created as computer generated landscapes, and presented as an existential “travelogue” under these three stages of confinement: his apartment, Abu Dhabi, and short trips outside Abu Dhabi. 

The whole experience was generated through the Display.Land app, which was discontinued in 2020, giving this work a unique place in space and time.