During Dutch Design Week 2013,
twenty-five designers set up their own production lines inside a former textile factory in the Netherlands,

making furniture, lighting, clothes, shoes, food and illustrations.
Curators and initiators of the C-Fabriek project Itay Ohaly and Thomas Vailly invited designers to create

their own production lines, machines, tools and products for what they call 'the New Factory.'

My own project 'The invisible - Line' was on of the project exhibited at C-Fabriek: it was an alternative

low tech way of producing monochromatic illustrations. 
Boiling water, metal brushes, silkscreen-like frames, lamp bulbs are transformed into new creative instruments, which use heat as their own ink on rolls of thermal fax paper used as canvases. 
This is a special fine paper coated with a chemical that changes color when exposed to heat. 
Normally used in thermal printers, adding machines, cash registers, credit card terminals to print data and receipts via fax, here it is used to produce illustrations and drawings in a different, analog new way. 

The 'invisible' it is the element linking together all those machines with my own idea of a drawing production line.

In fax machines a single tool (a hidden hot resistance) follows an invisible flow of data creating a multitude

of different effects, leaving traces on the paper using heat as ink. It's a very controlled system in which the

output is designed and meant to be perfect, capable of being repeated over and over again. 

In 'the invisible - line' man is acting as a machine.
In this case there's no flow of data to be followed, no multi purpose hidden tool doing everything. 
On the contrary, a variety of tools has been created and displayed on a production line, each one of them

doing a very specific job, each one of them requiring man in order to be used.
Self-designed / self-made tools are used to draw lines and shapes, to leave grayscale traces, to add splashes

of color on the white surface.
With no printer, with no color, just the paper as both medium and result.
The process is partially controlled but it's never perfect. Copies are never looking exactly the same,

even using the same tool.
Flaws are part of this line, improvisation and spontaneity replace perfection and technical accuracy.

Heat, with its shades, is the invisible that becomes visible.
Man, with his tools, is the new drawing machine.


www.frameweb.com

Video & edit: LYNfabrikken