Workshop

The NeoLucida is a drawing aid that lets you trace what you see. It’s a modern reinterpretation of the camera lucida, an optical drawing tool popular in the days before photography was invented. This simple device uses a beam-splitting prism to display a ghost image of the user’s subject on the paper. You can see your hand superimposed on the images, making it easy to make precise drawings. Since the early 19th century, artists and scientists have used the camera lucida to produce portraits and landscapes, accurate field drawings, image enlargements and reductions, and scientific illustrations. 
 
In this workshop, NeoLucida inventor Prof. Pablo Garcia will guide users in drawing a still-life composition with the NeoLucida. He will also share details on the history of the camera lucida and showcase some antique devices from his personal collection. Participants of all drawing skill levels are welcome. 
 
 

Pablo Garcia is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his research-based creative practice explores and reframes historical artistic processes for a 21st-century audience. His work examines the intersection of forgotten analog methods and cutting-edge digital technologies, paying homage to centuries of human-machine collaboration in art and design. Through a multidisciplinary approach, he investigates art-and-technology relationships across site-specific installations, machine-assisted drawings, kinetic sculptures, optical illusions, speculative architectures, and original scholarship.

Since 2013, he has commercially produced the NeoLucida, a modern reinterpretation of the camera lucida. Initially designed as a media-archaeological research project, the device is now in the collections of international institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, the Yale Center for British Art, the Science Museum (London), the Polytechnic Museum (Moscow), and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (Geneva).

Prof. Garcia has twice been named a Fulbright Scholar, and his extensive research on 600 years of drawing machines, documented at DrawingMachines.org, is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Garcia holds degrees in architecture from Cornell University and Princeton University.

Pablo Garcia

Professor, Department of Contemporary Practices School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

NLXL Artist Drawing Flowers
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