This leads to the commonly shared idea that the drawing is reduced to an informational normativity as if attened, and crashed onto the real. Against this mutation, we witness a form of obsolete romanticism that promotes the uniqueness of the sketch and freehand drawing as the author’s original act, both a recording of the world and a creative fulgurance. But this sharp opposition between drawing and technology carries a double omission.

Firstly, it negates that the architectural drawing has historically been linked to technological evolutions that, over the centuries, have regulated man’s relation to the real. From the invention of perspective to that of the printing press, technology has determined the epistemological and cultural transformations, allowing for the diffusion of the drawing as a tool to transmit information and, therefore, to regulate, teach and promote an architectonic culture.
The second omission is that computational drawing, by means of simulation procedures, opens up to complexity; its fundamentally rational nature does not abstract it from, but potentially reconnects it to imagination, via abstraction. As such, drawing remains a fundamentally speculative medium, to address the reality of our computational, hyper-abstract world. That is why it dialogues with and extends, the experimentations that have marked the 20th Century, from the expressionist power of Bruno Taut’s glass architecture and the rigour of De Stijl to contemporary point clouds and convolutions of digitally simulated flocks.

The program of exhibitions and workshops DRAWBOT will explore how post-digital drawing frees itself from function to reform its nature, in close relationship with other disciplines: simultaneously analytical, critical, speculative and expressive. In this perspective, DRAWBOT will present the work of architects, artists and computation scientists that experiment with simulation and modelling tools, robotic procedures and artificial intelligence, and alter what it means to draw.

Each elaborate strategies that redefine the figure of the author and the work of the hand, both strongly associated with traditional drawings. Certain embrace digital logic of production and aim at translating the quantitative aspect of computation, while others situate the subjectivity of the author in the qualitative, the accidental, the discontinuous, the volatile and the catastrophic.
Drawing can thus be the by-product of an interface, of a recording of the world via data, the fruit of a collaboration with the robot and of the delegation of a gesture, opening up to human and non-human co-authorship. But it can also, on the contrary, emerge from non-linear causalities at the granular scale, opening itself up to the highest simplicity or the most extreme complexity and thus blurring traditional categories.