Liz Melchor, an artist from San Francisco, California, is obsessed with drawing robots and pen plotters.
When drawing with her hands, she loves messiness and imprecision. She never has a vision she is working towards. Instead, she is driven by her own curiosity, always in search of surprise.
In a pen plotter, she found a machine that was the antithesis of how she liked to work: extremely precise and in need of a plan. The tension was alluring. Immediately, she wondered how she could introduce wonder into something so exact.
She explores various materials and techniques, pushing the machine to the limits of its possibilities. This has led her to delve into creative coding, explore generative art, and most recently try to figure out how to build her own robots. She is having fun at this intersection between the technological and material.
Before arriving in Vienna, Liz lived for five years in Lisbon, Portugal where she ran a cultural association called Curious Monkey and where still runs Storytelling Lisboa, a monthly storytelling event. She holds graduate degrees in psychology and writing, but lately wishes she had spent some more time studying engineering.