Méta-Matics (Jean Tinguely, 1959)

The Méta-Matics are drawing machines by the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), first shown in Paris in 1959. A motor drives an arm that holds drawing tools chosen by the visitor against a sheet of paper, and the machine produces an abstract drawing of lines and dots.^1, 2 They were exhibited six years before the first computer drawings, and Wikipedia counts them among generative works of art.¹

How a Méta-Matic draws

A Méta-Matic has neither program nor memory. The result is, in Wikipedia's words, "a random composition of lines and dots".¹ The visitor has a share in it by choosing the drawing tools and their colours.¹ The diagram above is JAEV's general picture of such a mechanism, not a drawing of Tinguely's.

The drawings resemble the gestural abstract painting of the 1950s; they also mimic it.¹ The Moderna Museet in Stockholm describes Tinguely as "aiming a blow at informal painting, which was all the rave in Paris in the 1950s".³

Paris, 1959

In 1959, half a year after a joint show with Yves Klein, the gallery owner Iris Clert showed les Méta-Matics de Tinguely: les sculptures qui peignent ("the sculptures that paint").^4, 5 According to Wikipedia, visitors made about 4,000 drawings and at least five to six thousand people came; there was a competition for the best drawing made on a Méta-Matic, judged by a jury that included Hans Arp, Yves Klein and the critic Pierre Restany.¹

For the Paris Biennale the same year Tinguely built Méta-Matic No. 17.^1, 4 It is large, 330 × 170 × 190 cm, of painted iron and wood, with a petrol engine whose exhaust slowly fills a balloon until it bursts. The Moderna Museet, which received it as a gift from its Friends in 1965, says that it "dances, makes noises and incessantly spits out ink drawings".³

Machines that draw, with and without computers

A Méta-Matic and a pen plotter both move a pen over paper with motors, but they answer to different things. A plotter such as the Zuse Graphomat Z64 follows coordinates calculated in advance by a program, and the same program gives the same drawing every time unless it calls on random numbers. A Méta-Matic has no coordinates and no program: what it draws comes from the mechanism and the tools the visitor puts in it. Other mechanical drawing machines of the time, built from military calculators, are described in Desmond Paul Henry's drawing machines and John Whitney's Catalog.

Metamatic Reloaded, shown at the Museum Tinguely in Basel in 2013–14, brought together ten new works by artists including Marina Abramović and Thomas Hirschhorn; they came from an open call in 2009 to rethink the drawing machines from today's point of view.⁶