IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘TEN TO ONE‘ (PHOTO BY MENASA EMIRATI DESIGN PLATFORM, EXPO DUBAI 2020), ‘EDOUARD CABAY AT HIS STUDIO’ (PHOTO BY CECILIA DÍAZ BETZ), ‘THINGING’ (PHOTO BY GUNNAR KNECHTEL), ‘SECOND DEVIATION‘, ‘ATLAS DES INFINIS POTENTIELS‘, ‘DROPS’. ALL PROJECTS © EDOUARD CABAY
Design practice is undergoing a radical transformation. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, complex outcomes can now be generated through something as simple as a sentence. This has provoked both fascination and anxiety: if machines can respond to our instructions and produce results we cannot entirely predict, what remains for the designer to do?
The most adventurous designers are doing what innovators have always done when confronted with new technologies: learning how to converse with them. Increasingly, this means learning how to design through instructions—codes, algorithms and prompts—and how to navigate the space between intention and outcome.
Edouard Cabay has been exploring this territory for years, with drawing at the centre of his practice. Working across the hand, computation and robotics, he constructs systems in which control is deliberately incomplete. He hacks machines designed for perfect repetition to introduce error and singularity; elsewhere, he subjects the human hand to precise instructions and repetitive movements, producing drawings that appear almost machine-made. The drawing becomes both an outcome and a record of the process that produced it—and the distinction between human and machine begins to blur.
At the centre of Cabay’s practice is therefore not the machine itself, but the instruction: a framework that establishes the conditions for an action without entirely determining its outcome. His work explores this threshold between freedom and control, asking how much an author can determine and how much must be allowed to emerge. In doing so, it proposes a role for the designer that feels increasingly relevant today: not simply designing the result, but designing the conditions from which it can emerge.
EDOUARD CABAY © CECILIA DÍAZ BETZ
Interview by Marcela Spadaro | Edited by Candela De Bortoli | Visual curation by Asiel Nuñez | Images and videos courtesy of Edouard Cabay
You trained as an architect, but your practice now sits increasingly within art. How do you define yourself today?
Edouard Cabay: As both, although I am increasingly presenting myself as an artist because of the structure of the projects I make. They don’t result in architectural interventions, nor are they about providing a service. They are often self-initiated, and drawing is frequently the outcome rather than a means to something else.
At the same time, I approach these projects with the attitude and tools I learned in architectural education and practice. Drawing is important, but so are making, materials, and the details of the installations I build. More fundamentally, I’m very attached to precision. My work requires a high degree of calibration, so I work extensively with measurement, geometry, systems, units, and rules. All of these things come, in one way or another, from an architectural culture.
I think that’s the reason why I enjoy teaching in architecture schools. I like the simultaneous engagement with technique and conceptual thinking, and the way creativity can take place within a rigorous methodological framework.
I have had a few experiences teaching in art schools, and sometimes I found it more difficult. My impression was that students often immediately looked for their own space, trying to emancipate themselves from the brief or the teacher. In architecture education, students seem more willing to work within the framework and the rules of a brief, and then look for singular solutions within them. I find that relationship between constraint and freedom productive, both in teaching and in my own work.
So, when it comes to defining myself, I guess I will always hesitate. We are often asked to introduce ourselves in one word, and I am never quite sure whether ‘artist’ or ‘architect’ is more appropriate. I am comfortable and uncomfortable with both. The most accurate answer is probably somewhere between the two. I am an architect who works very differently from what people expect an architect to do, and I am an artist who was not trained as one, carrying a certain imposter syndrome.
IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘CHOREOGRAPHY OF REPRESENTATIONS III’, ‘PAYSAGE EMERGENT’, ‘TRAJECTORIES’ (INSTALLATION PHOTO BY XAVIER GONZALEZ). ALL PROJECTS © EDOUARD CABAY
Drawing seems to sit at the centre of everything you do. Is it a tool in the process, or is the drawing itself the work?
EC: The drawings I make are not instructions for the construction of something, nor do they aim to represent something that already exists. I use drawing as a way of tracing things, of revealing something that happens over time. I am very attached to the notion of ‘emergence’: using drawing to create surprise, unexpectedness, and indeterminate outcomes.
A lot of work therefore precedes the drawing itself: constructing a machine, inventing a protocol for someone or something else to draw, writing code. These processes tend to lead to drawings that are strange, singular, and difficult to anticipate.
This means the invention happens in two places: in the drawing itself, and in the way the drawing is made. I am often asked which of the two is more important. It is a question I cannot really answer. To me, they both have their own value, and both should be enjoyable to look at.
I think a lot comes from questions I already had during architecture school. I studied at the AA [Architectural Association] in London between 2000 and 2005, when some studios were strongly embracing the computer as a creative tool, while others were still cultivating the savoir-faire and intelligence of hand drawing, manual detail, and craftsmanship. It might not have been as clear-cut as I remember, but I often saw these two domains as in opposition. I was very drawn towards the rapid arrival of new computational and fabrication tools, but at the same time I struggled to find a place for my own hands within this new technological landscape.
Now, after all these years, the opposition I seem to have constructed for myself feels much less interesting. I’d rather understand what can bring the hand and new technologies together, and what each can contribute to the other, while making sure that the knowledge we already have (including what has been transmitted through generations of practice) remains relevant within contemporary processes.
Computers, software, programming, robotics, and prototyping: all of these can be sources of pleasure and discovery. I find it a shame when using one tool means rejecting another.
What would you say the hand gives you that a digital or robotic tool cannot?
EC: The hand is so sophisticated. It is the tool most directly connected to our brain! Hand drawings and handwriting have imperfections, mistakes, hesitations, and uncertainty.
One of the spaces I enjoy working in the most is my sketchbook. It is where I have moments of discovery, pleasure, satisfaction, and reflection. I might use colours, collage, paint, or different media, but it belongs exclusively to the hand. It puts me into a state of thinking and being with myself that I value enormously.
It feels private, too. It is not necessarily something to share; it can simply be a moment to use the hand to think, express something, or learn. One can take notes, make connections, and record experiences. It translates moments into something that remains on a page.
And yet your finished drawings often look as if they were made by a machine. Why does the hand-drawn aesthetic itself not seduce you as much?
EC: For me, the sketchbook is a place to list and explore problems. When a problem starts to take shape, it often leads to CAD [computer-aided design], modelling, and fabrication. In that sense, hand drawing has a particular status: it belongs to the process. It is not necessarily about indeterminacy or emergence. Of course, it could be, but that is not something I have explored much in the sketchbook.
IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘SCRIPTS - MACHINE 3‘, ‘CAPTURE ALIVE‘, ‘DESDOBLAMIENTO‘, ‘JULES AND JULES‘, ‘EDOUARD CABAY’S STUDIO’ (PHOTOGRAPHY BY CECILIA DÍAZ BETZ). ALL PROJECTS © EDOUARD CABAY
IMAGES ABOVE: ‘SKETCHBOOK’ © EDOUARD CABAY
So when technology enters the work, what are you actually asking the machine to do?
EC: My work consists of inventing a framework in which I give away part of the authority over a drawing to things around me, be that people, machines, natural forces, or code.
I want to create a drawing, but I want to introduce components that I cannot completely control. The drawing then becomes less like executing an image I already have in mind and more like a situation in which different lines of action meet and affect one another. I want to project the act of drawing into an environment where uncertainty can act.
Many artists I admire have worked with this idea. The Surrealists searched for ways to affect their own control through mechanisms such as the ‘Cadavre Exquis’ [a collaborative drawing game invented by the Surrealists in the 1920s, in which each participant adds to a composition without seeing the previous contributions]. One of my most important references is Sol LeWitt [American artist, 1928–2007, a leading figure of Conceptual art and Minimalism], who imagined instruction-based drawings without physically executing them himself. This question of giving away part of the authority, placing oneself inside a framework where other forces contribute to the result, is at the centre of what I am looking for.
Industrial machines are designed to eliminate error and repeat perfectly. You seem interested in almost the opposite.
EC: I am not interested in producing the same object 1,000 times. This is not about productivity or efficiency; it is about discovery, about creating a mechanism that generates results and surprises. I am very attracted to the ambiguity of not knowing how a drawing was made.
I often look for ways to make a machine imprecise, to make it fail, or to cultivate a certain level of imperfection, so that the result is always singular. For example, I’ve constructed devices that drop droplets of ink, attach them to robots, and program them to follow very regular paths (a grid, for instance). In theory, the resulting drawing should be made of perfect dots arranged along a perfect grid. But in the physical world, the drops are never quite equal, and each one deforms differently when it hits the paper, producing a singular mark. The final drawing contains both: a high degree of imprecision and a certain regularity.
Some friends tell me I am trying to humanise the machine, to make it produce something different every time.
The artist’s or designer’s attitude becomes very important. Some people would reject a work if they don’t feel they are the sole author of each element. I believe there is another way. One can lose control over something and still recognise oneself as the author of what emerges
How do you teach that balance between authorship and surrender?
EC: I approach computation through hand drawing. I teach a short computation course at La Salle [La Salle School of Architecture, part of Ramon Llull University] in Barcelona, and I ask students not to make a drawing but to think of a drawing. Then they turn it into instructions and give them to another student, who makes the drawing and returns it.
At the beginning, students think that if the returned drawing is identical to the original, their instructions were correct. But obviously it is never the same. It resembles the original, but it is transformed.
The interesting space is between control and freedom. Too much control will produce something completely expected. Very loose instructions might create something completely unrelated that also loses meaning. The threshold in between is where one can maintain partial authorship while allowing the person drawing to contribute their own hand and mind. It’s about understanding the right level of precision in an instruction and how much interpretation can exist.
What happens when a student dislikes what comes back?
EC: Frustration, but if you try to understand what it is about, frustration can become very productive. The question is no longer simply, ‘Do I like it or not?’ It becomes: ‘What do I accept from what the other person contributed? What do I reject?’ As an artist, this becomes a mirror. It is a very introspective process. It allows you to understand what belongs to you and what does not.
Sol Lewitt
IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘DROPS’ (VIDEO & FABRICATION PHOTO BY NONAME DEPARTMENT - PHOTOS OF TILES AT CABAY’S STUDIO BY PIT SIEBENALER), ‘THE ALBERTI DRAWING‘. ALL PROJECTS © EDOUARD CABAY
You are applying a similar idea in the work being made in your studio now. Can you describe that process?
EC: I am currently collaborating with a woman named Paola, who has an amazing hand-drawing stroke. I prepare instructions and communicate them to her in writing. They consist mainly of point positions and coordinates distributed across a page. Paola then has to draw one long, continuous line with a very thin pen for one hour. Her hand speed has to remain constant, so the curves maintain a relatively consistent radius. The hand’s inertia governs the movement, so there are no sudden changes in direction or kinks. We worked extensively to define what that speed should be and how small these curves should become.
Because she draws continuously for an hour, areas of greater and lesser ink concentration gradually appear. I give very little freedom: the points are defined, the movement is defined. Yet when you look at the distribution of the points, it is almost impossible to imagine what the final drawing will look like. This uncertainty does not come from a lack of precision. Quite the opposite. I establish precise conditions (coordinates, speed, duration, and geometry) and then let the physical reality of the process introduce what I cannot fully control. The drawing has to be made in order to exist; it cannot really be planned in advance.
In that sense, I am interested less in the drawing as an object than in the drawing as something coming into being. The line is not simply the trace of an image I already have in mind; it is produced through the movement itself.
Every day, I change the distribution of the points and Paola makes another one-hour-long curve. The drawings are very similar to one another, but each one is new, different, and singular. I use this to test the range of control: how much can be determined in advance, and how much inevitably escapes?
I have been thinking about Tim Ingold’s [British anthropologist] writing on the line, particularly the distinction between a line as a connection between points and a line as the trace of a movement. In this work, I am much more interested in the second. The points I give Paola are not really the drawing; they are conditions through which the line has to move. The actual drawing emerges through the hand’s movement between them.
You sometimes ask two people to execute the same system or point distribution and then physically combine their drawings. What does that exercise reveal?
EC: From a distance, there appears to be a continuous line from one sheet to the next. The drawing seems complete or integral. But when you look closely, no two lines actually coincide; every line is slightly different. For me, the cut becomes a measuring tool.
I love looking at drawings from far away and from very close. From far away, you don’t notice anything, but as you approach, there is a moment when you realise something is strange. You understand it is not one drawing made by one person, but two halves combined. It investigates the space of freedom one person gives another, even when the level of control is very high.
Scale seems important too. What happens when these drawings become much larger than the body that produces them?
EC: The individual drawings are connected to the size of the arm and the paper, around one metre by 70 centimetres. Cutting lets me assemble them into very large drawings, three or four metres or more.
I want to work with different series: some with random distributions of points, others with very symmetrical structures. When people see these drawings, they often think they cannot have been made by a human because they seem very precise. But up close, they are not precise at all. At the same time, they are extremely precise because of the obsession with repeating the movement so many times. I like creating moments of doubt.
All my drawings have a strong relationship with time and duration. I like the word ‘subtle’: entering a space where you begin to imagine the process that created something based only on the final result.
Was this idea of designing a framework rather than a fixed form already present in your architectural teaching?
EC: Yes. One of the starting points was a course I taught at IAAC. Students had to design a public space for the future. What interested me was not form but instruction: how do you create a space that can evolve over time depending on what happens?
I was interested in algorithms as a way of defining conditions in advance without necessarily determining the final outcome. You write something now, but it will be used later. It can react to situations or guide them with more or less control.
I asked students to find something that moved along their route to school and connect it with a pen and paper. One worked with waves, creating a pendulum that responded to the sea. Others worked with pigeons, wind or the movement of the metro. The pigeon project placed a bowl of seeds on top of pencils so that as the birds came to eat, the bowl moved and created drawings.
Each project constructed a kind of machine or instrument: a mechanism producing lines that were always singular. Four drawings could clearly belong together as a series, but no two were identical. That exercise became more important than the original project because it contained so many of the questions I am still investigating.
IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘TEN TO ONE’ (PHOTOS BY MENASA EMIRATI DESIGN PLATFORM, EXPO DUBAI 2020), ‘SCORE FOR 50‘, ‘EDOUARD CABAY’S STUDIO‘ (PHOTO BY CECILIA DÍAZ BETZ), ‘CHOREOGRAPHY OF REPETITIONS‘, ‘THINGING‘ (PHOTO BY GUNNAR KNECHTEL). ALL PROJECTS © EDOUARD CABAY
Your work depends so much on process. How do you communicate that without telling viewers what they are supposed to see?
EC: When I exhibit this type of work, I often have the drawings and videos showing how they were made. In one exhibition [exhibition title, museum, city, and year to be added], the museum had two rooms. In the first, I showed only the drawings, with no explanation.
People stood in front of them and interpreted them. Children would say, ‘I see clouds,’ or ‘I see animals.’ They created their own readings. In the end, it is also an exercise in imagination.
Then they entered the second room and watched videos explaining the processes. Afterwards, they often went back to the first room and suddenly looked at the drawings differently. At first, they experienced the drawing simply as an image. Then, after understanding the process, they returned with completely different eyes. They looked at it technically.
I really like playing with this distinction. Everyone has their own sensibility, their own way of understanding, and their own system of values. I find that very powerful. In architecture school, perhaps I didn’t learn to value enough the moment when someone stands in front of a result and experiences it without knowing everything that led to it.
Do you ever put the robot itself into the exhibition, or do you prefer the machine to remain implicit?
EC: Yes, sometimes, but I try not to overuse the robot. First of all, I don’t think my work is about robots. They are part of it, but they take up so much space in people’s imagination that they can become reductive.
I think robots have incredible creative potential, and I really enjoy playing with them. However, I have to admit that the world of robotics gives me some concerns. I am not sure society is moving in the best direction with some of these technologies.
If I include a robot in an exhibition, it is because I want it to do something very subtle, something far from what we usually expect from a machine. I really enjoy building small machines using motors, cut pieces, and simple mechanisms. It is very easy to begin automating something simple.
I also try to show as much as possible when I make interventions in exhibition spaces. I like the idea that a child, or anyone, can come and understand, ‘Okay, this is something I could make.’ At IAAC, for many years, we ran Fab Lab Kids, afternoons when children came to use machines. I find the idea that an eight-year-old can begin to interact with a robot fascinating. It makes the machine less distant, less mysterious. The important thing is to understand that the robot is neither impossible nor inaccessible.
What interests me is what happens when complexity emerges from these simple conditions. With one thread, the pen moves predictably. With two, the movement becomes more complex. With three, suddenly it becomes something I cannot fully understand myself.
So complexity matters only when it grows out of something simple and legible?
EC: Exactly. I am not interested in complexity for its own sake. What interests me is combining something extremely simple, something we could build here on this table, with technology that can be learned relatively quickly and simple code, and producing a result of enormous complexity.
This connects again to the desire to keep the machine close: to understand what it is doing, to intervene in it, and to see what happens when simple mechanisms begin to produce complexity.
But it’s also a way of demystifying the machine. All these tools that surround us (our phones, computers, and other technologies) are not magic. They are made of things that are much closer and more accessible than we often imagine.
IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘FIRST DEVIATION‘ (PHOTOS BY PETER MAGNUS), ‘COREOGRAPHY OF REPETITIONS III‘, ‘SECOND DEVIATION‘, ‘THINGING‘. ALL PROJECTS © EDOUARD CABAY
EDOUARD CABAY PROJECTS COLLABORATORS:
Jules and Jules: Alexandre Dubor. With the collaboration of IAAC.
First Deviation: Peter Geelmuyden Magnus, Soroush Garivani, Kunal Singh Chadha. Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and ABB. Exhibited at Ars Santa Mónica.
Second Deviation: Peter Geelmuyden Magnus, Soroush Garivani. Exhibited at Area Institute. Curation: Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou. Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and ABB.
Alice, A collective drawing: Students of Alice-Epfl, Teresa Cheung. Workshop at Epfl.
The Alberti Drawing: Students of Ensa Versailles.
Choreography of a machine: Peter Geelmuyden Magnus. Workshop at Bergen School of Architecture.
Saudi winds: Eduardo Chamorro Martin and Peter Geelmuyden Magnus. Exhibited at Misk Art Institute, curated by Samer Yamani.
Ten to One: Peter Geelmuyden Magnus, Soroush Garivani, Ardeshit Talaei, Iwan Maktabi + Qsar al Hosn’s House of Artesans. Exhibited at Expo Dubai. Curator: Samer Yamani.
Instruction Drawing: Michelle Bezik, Ruby McNeel, Adriani Olympia Charoni and Paola Salamanca.
Trajectories: Peter Magnus, Soroush Garivani, Francesca Piñol, Martina Morittu nd 10 students of La Massana. Exhibited at La Massana, Barcelona.
Thinging: Farah Ali, Alejandro Rondon and Raimund Krenmueller. Exhibited at Palo Alto Foundation.
Drops: Toni Cumella, Eugenio bettucchi, Farah Ali and Francisco Martínez. Ceramica Cumella. Exhibited at Unico Gallery.
6 paintbrushes: Javi Albo, Amaro Donodo and Farah Ali.