Jonathan Wendt is a generative artist based out of Ridgewood, Queens. He focuses on combining advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics with old-school tools and mediums, using technical pens, brushes, fountain pens, specialty inks, and high quality papers, to explore the space between the Digital World, and the Analog. If you'd like to see more of his work, or commission a plot for yourself, please check out www.Wendt.Art.
The first people Jonathan met while attending A New HOPE '22 (Hackers on Planet Earth) were the incredibly friendly and helpful Jeff, Ed, and Douglas of the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe! Befriending them motivated him to create his first Nikola Tesla inspired piece to give to them, which became the precursor for this series! He's very excited to be able to collaborate with the Tesla Science Center and be able to help contribute to them furthering their work with the laboratory, and bolstering their education programs.
Each one of the pieces in this series, 'Virtues and Failings', is a one-of-a-kind 'plot' made by a pen-plotting robot, using only one single line! Jonathan's process for creating each of these unique plots started off by feeding the line of text "A portrait of Nikola Tesla, Lord of Lightning, wearing a tuxedo, surrounded by lightning." as a prompt to an Artificial Intelligence (Stable Diffusion for this series), and iterating over it hundreds of times, generating images until he is able to achieve a combination of composition and subject that is worth further exploration. From there, he needs to change that image full of pesky pixels into a set of vectorized directions his robot can follow; this is the step where he creates a design that turns it from a full colour image into something that is made using only a single stroke! With that done, he sets up his choice of paper, ink, and drawing implement, gives these directions over to the plotter to let it do it's incredibly precise handiwork.
The time it took to complete each plot, and the length of the line that makes it up: 2: 3 hours and 51 minutes, 303.63 meters. 3: 5 hours and 47 minutes, 448.12 meters. 4: 5 hours and 4 minutes, 389.05 meters. 5: 4 hours and 25 minutes, 349.73 meters.
