📙 #064 - Drawing Machines & Riso & Code & Zines & The Pit of Carkoon

GET IN THE PIT!

Jun 26, 2025

There’s a wonderfully/frustratingly/surprisingly/amazing small group of people who use drawing machines, make videos, and make videos about drawing machines, meaning it’s always a delight to see a new video pop up on YouTube, here’s Kelly…

…so of course…

…TheAdrift to the rescue…

All that aside, the fun thing here is that Kelly has been doing Riso printing for years and recently decided to add a drawing machine as another tool in her creative arsenal.

Meanwhile I’ve gone on the other direction of using drawing machines for years and recently added a Riso machine 😁

You can find out more about Kelly over on her Patreon

Speaking of Riso, there’s also Sarah Ridgley, — “Media artist using JavaScript + Risograph to build systems that explore digital gesture and physical print.” — who I’m pretty sure most of you already follow, but if you don’t you should: https://www.instagram.com/sarahridgley/

(☝️ Code + Riso Printing, 24 frames - Sarah Ridgley ☝️)

So we’ve got generative art, design, riso print, code, and drawing machines (and we really need to throw letterpress and field recordings into that mix too) — I wonder what SN-sz7kw would make of it all!

Thanks for reading Drawing Machines & Notes from Art Studio Robots! This post is public so feel free to share it.

# FLICKR FOUNDATION

I wanted to drop in a quick mention about my actual day job. Just over 20 years ago I worked for and helped build the photo sharing website flickr.com, the place where people put all their photos before Instagram and Facebook.

Now, many years later I’m working for the Flickr Foundation.

The 501(c)(3) Flickr Foundation exists to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years, preserving our shared visual commons for future generations.

Flickr has grown into one of the biggest photo collections on Earth. It contains tens of billions of images from people all over the world, and keeps growing every day.

That’s why we’ve created the Flickr Foundation—an independent, community-focused organization. We’re committed to stewarding this cultural treasure for future generations, and fostering a visual commons we can all enjoy.

There’s not many times you get a chance to circle back to something and somewhere you enjoyed working on and with two decades later, so of course I had to jump at the chance.

One of the thought experiments or design fictions we’re working with is “What if Flickr vanished?” - which puts me in the somewhat weird, and again semi-fictional position of being having been a midwife for photo collections back then, and conceptually a death doula for them now 🤔

I could go on to try and explain or describe more, but, if you’re in any way interested in photography, documentary, archiving and preservation there’s a bunch of good stuff over on our blog: https://www.flickr.org/blog/ which does a much better job.

Here are some good ones to jump into to give you a taste, I mean just the titles are probably enough to get the gist.

Of course we’re blessed with living in “interesting times” where documenting and preserving both personal and national archives is… challenging, so you know my job is “fun”!

# A RISO ZINE, BECAUSE OF COURSE

One of the blog posts “The Forgetful Web: A Case for Reflective Archiving” by Jill Blackmore Evans, caught my eye.

George is off to the yearly Flickr team retreat thing and we figured taking some “swag” would be good; as a team we’d been thinking about what fliers, posters, postcards and such could be given to people, and I was itching to try to make a zine on the Riso printer.

With a very rusty memory of flowing text from one box to another in InDesign, I copy and pasted the blog post in and took it from there.

This was very much a “can this be done (by me)?” experiment, with the answers being yes, yes, and a big list of things to do better next time.

# WEB 2.0 to WEB 3.0

Substack tells me, once more, that this email is at its limit, because this week I’ve chosen many images over words 😁 so here’s my quick observation.

I had the pleasure of working on Flickr when “Web 2.0” was properly kicking off, all about APIs and different platforms talking to each other, and how lovely it was to share.

And now I’m at the “how do we keep a permanent ledger of things to help preserve records?” stage. Answers on a postcard please to the usual address, especially when the answer isn’t “use IPFS” (unless it actually is).

# THE END

Last newsletter I said “there is a very slim chance by the next newsletter (24th June btw) that the first introduction module will have been uploaded to YouTube, about 11 videos in all” - about the pen plotter tutorials I was recording.

Well, I’ve got six out of those 11 recorded and edited, so progress™️.

I think I’ve now decided it’s some kind of sport to try and guess what I’ll be writing about in the next newsletter, but also if I say it, perhaps it’ll become true; manifesting and intentions and all that 😅 So this time let’s say in next newsletter (10th July) we’ll have more tutorial videos done, and some FALLiNGWATER riso prints and notebooks made.

Love you all
Dan
❤️

This week’s music…