OSArc Manifesto

The Open Source Architecture manifesto lived on a Wikipedia page, written and rewritten by anyone. For Adhocracy, curated by Joseph Grima at the Istanbul Design Biennial, Carlo Ratti Associati, FabLab Torino, and I built a machine that copied it onto a gallery wall as it changed.

It's a large polargraph: an acrylic chassis holding the electronics and a whiteboard marker, hanging from cords driven by stepper motors and an Arduino. A Processing app watched the Wikipedia page, parsed the text, and generated vector paths. The machine drew during the day, and a servo-driven brush wiped the wall every night.

On site, the first run produced chaos instead of text. Without access to the machine, I built a simulator to compare the intended coordinates with what the microcontroller actually produced, and found the bug: the bigger wall made the 16-bit integers in the trigonometry overflow. Recompiling with 32-bit integers fixed it.

The machine then ran for two months without major failures, and its architecture became the starting point for later commercial wall-drawing devices.