Viktor, a large wall-drawing machine that is controlled by an adapted design software and powered by four small industrial motors, traces imagery in chalk on the black gallery wall: a project between art, design, and engineering.
Published on the occasion of A Recent History of Writing & Drawing by Jürg Lehni & Alex Rich, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2008.
Jürg Lehni (born 1978 in Lucerne, lives and works in London)
is an independent designer, developer and artist. His self-initiated work originates from reflections about tools, the computer and the way we work with and adapt to technology.
Over the past years he worked on a family of projects that are all linked through these topics. Most of these projects were collaborations with people from other backgrounds (Graphic designers, artists, typgoraphers and engineers).
Alex Rich (born 1977 in Caerphilly, lives and works in London) approaches design from a multi-disciplinary perspective. As a member of the jury that judged Jürg Lehni's ECAL degree show in 2002, and seeing one of Lehni's drawing machines at work, Rich—a deft observer of accidental meaning—opened a discussion with the designer about the machine's historical and cultural context. Alex Rich viewed the work as, “the translation of imagery from mind to machine to wall," and suggested assembling, for an exhibition, compilations with similar writing and drawing machines.
