On the evening of Monday December 8, 02014 from 8pm to midnight, we witnessed the first demonstrations of Jürg Lehni’s Chalk-Drawing Machine at The Interval.

Jürg was in attendance and gave live demonstrations throughout the evening.

The Long Now Foundation commissioned Jürg and his team in Switzerland to build a custom version of his Viktor chalk-drawing machine and create software to interface with it for our San Francisco bar/cafe/museum venue The Interval. We are working with Jürg to develop content for the machine and eventually make it a platform for use by visiting speakers and artists.

The design of the chalk-drawing machine is extremely elegant, using an unconventional system of pulleys that is driven by high-quality Maxon Swiss servo motors to triangulate the drawing tool. The motors are coordinated by an open-source controller developed by Jürg himself.

Thanks to swissnex San Francisco who brought Jürg Lehni and his work to San Francisco in 02013; we met Jürg through his participation in several shows that year.