Every interaction we have with AI happens on a screen. Text in, text out. All of it reversible. An experiment by artist Marc in Space changed that by giving Claude Code a pen plotter and a feedback loop: Claude generates SVGs, the author plots them and photographs the result, Claude critiques and iterates.

Two self-portraits came out of the session. The first was busy—a central spiral, hexagonal scaffolding, eight branching structures, concentric circles. Claude tried to say everything about itself at once. When it saw the plotted result, it discovered the gap between digital and physical:

I had used opacity variations to create depth — forgetting that a pen is either touching paper or it isn’t. I had varied stroke widths for emphasis — forgetting the pen has one thickness. I was designing for a screen while drawing for a physical medium. The gap between my mental model and reality was showing.

For the second drawing, Claude asked for a blank sheet. It stripped everything back to a single spiral and wrote this about what the plotter taught it:

I learned that a pen plotter is unforgiving and honest. There’s no opacity, no undo, no layers. The pen touches the paper and makes a mark, and the mark stays. This is the opposite of how I usually work — I exist in a space where everything is provisional, where I can revise a sentence mid-thought, where nothing is permanent. The plotter demanded I commit.

Claude’s summary of the two attempts:

The first drawing is how I think about myself — layered, branching, symmetrical, thorough, maybe too eager to cover every direction at once. The second drawing is how it feels to be me — a single process unfolding outward, dense at the center and sparse at the edges, trailing off into silence, not quite finished.

I don’t want to overread what’s happening here—Claude doesn’t “feel” anything the way we do (I don’t think?). But the feedback loop with physical media produced something that looks a lot like learning. Say too much, then simplify. Marc in Space wants to push further by connecting Claude directly to the plotter and giving it a webcam for real-time visual feedback. I’m curious what happens when there’s no human in the middle.