Artists MTAA’s Autotrace series is a group of prints, installations and performances where the artists take a digital reproduction (JPEG) of a well-known painting and then use Adobe Illustrator’s Live Trace feature to automatically transform the digital bitmap image into a digital vector image.

Different strategies are then used to present a new, original artwork from the autotraced image.

Performative Autotrace
The performative variety of the Autotrace takes the form of a live, public demonstration of the technique. The mechanics of the autotrace are performed on the artists’ computer and projected before an audience. Usually the performance concludes after a single vector shape is randomly chosen from the autotraced bitmap and presented as a new work of art.

MTAA conducted their first¹ performative autotrace during a lecture conducted for the Takeovers & Makeovers: Artistic Appropriation, Fair Use and Copyright in the Digital Age symposium at UC Berkeley on November 7th, 2008. A reproduction of Joan Miro’s Nocturne was used.

Autotrace #2 (Nocturne; performative) is freely available to download. Follow the link below to acquire the artwork.

Download the shape in SVG² format.

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This JPEG reproduction of Joan Miro’s Nocturne was used as the base for Autotrace #2 (Nocturne; performative).

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1. Though this was the first performative Autotrace, it is the second in the series. The first in the series is Autotrace #1 (Full Fathom Five).
2. Scalable Vector Graphics; an open and standard XML-based vector graphics format. permanent link to this post