As an ambidextrous artist, I draw with both hands simultaneously, an intuitive, physical choreography that produces intricate, flowing compositions. This dual-handed practice formed the basis for my collaboration with Hi-DARS Lab at Texas Tech University, where we set out to explore how robotics and code could reflect the expressive gestures of the human hand.

Together we created a system in which two large industrial robotic arms were programmed to mimic my simultaneous hand movements. These robots were not just mimicking motion; they became an extension of my body, translating my analog gestures into precise, choreographed performances in space. The project raised profound questions: Can code feel? Can a machine mirror the rhythm, the emotion, and the spontaneity of a human artist?

This work also carries another layer inspired by my experience of synesthesia, a perceptual condition where sound becomes shape, color, and line. My visual language is often rooted in music, interpreted through movement and form. In this project, the robots moved according to pre-encoded instructions derived from my ambidextrous drawings, while I responded viscerally to the music that originally inspired the lines, bridging human intuition and machine logic in parallel interpretations.

The result is Ambidextrous Robotic Light Painting, a body of work that began as twelve intertwined portraits, drawn with two single continuous curves on canvas. These 2D drawings became frameworks for motion. The robotic arms traced the original lines through space using light, captured via long-exposure photography and videography. This transformed each drawing into an expanded visual language across 2D, 3D, and 4D, where time, space, and gesture converge.

Now exhibited at the Museum of Light and Art in Kansas, this work lives as both installation and performance, a conversation between gesture and code, analog and digital, human and machine. In this collaboration, we don’t see technology as a replacement for creativity, but as its amplifier. It’s a vision of a future where artistic expression expands beyond the hand, beyond the page, into space itself.