CMU Drawing With Machines at the Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery
From January 9 through January 31, 2026, the Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery in Peekskill, New York hosted an exhibition of work by students from ’s Fall 2025 course Drawing With Machines at . More than a student show, the exhibition offered a window into Levin’s long standing investigation of computation, authorship, and machine mediated drawing.
Levin is internationally recognized for his work at the intersection of code, systems, and physical expression. For decades, his artistic practice and teaching have explored how rules, algorithms, and tools can become collaborators in the creative process. Drawing With Machines is a direct extension of that thinking, treating drawing not as a gesture of the hand, but as the outcome of designed behaviors executed by machines.
The exhibition presented drawings created through plotting systems, custom mechanisms, and code driven processes that embraced both precision and failure. Under Levin’s guidance, students designed systems rather than images, articulating drawing instincts as deterministic rules and then negotiating the realities of motors, pens, paper, friction, and gravity. The resulting works reflect a core theme of Levin’s practice: the tension between intention and emergence.
Several students traveled from Pittsburgh to Peekskill for the opening reception, turning the exhibition into a live continuation of the course. In addition to framed works on the walls, Levin expanded a long running class tradition into the gallery by encouraging students to produce over 1,300 small plotter made drawings for sale through the gallery’s sticker vending machines. The format emphasized accessibility, repetition, and distribution, ideas that frequently surface in Levin’s work and pedagogy.
The opening night was packed, with work moving quickly off the walls. For many students, it was their first time seeing their machine assisted drawings enter a public, commercial gallery context. Levin described the experience as a meaningful shift for the class, allowing students to place their work directly into the hands of people who genuinely wanted it.
Levin’s approach to teaching is intentionally exploratory. Rather than simulating industry pipelines or optimizing for efficiency, Drawing With Machines focuses on arcane, experimental, and sometimes fragile processes. Students engage with historical tools like G-code alongside contemporary plotting systems, learning that machines will always do exactly what they are told, even when that instruction leads to unexpected or broken results. In Levin’s framing, the true collaborators are not the motors, but the materials and physics that resist total control.
Several students extended the visit into a short working residency, arriving early with boxes of pens and markers to take advantage of Bantam Tools’ large format drawing machines. For some, it was the first time seeing their systems operate at architectural scale, transforming intimate plotter drawings into works taller than the artist.
The exhibition made visible something central to Levin’s influence as both an artist and educator: when code leaves the screen and enters the physical world, it becomes subject to constraint, chance, and interpretation. Drawing With Machines demonstrated how thoughtfully designed systems can produce not just images, but insight into how humans and machines think together.
We were honored to host Golan Levin and his students at the Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery and to present this body of work as part of an ongoing conversation about computation, tools, and the future of machine based art.