KAAYA: The Body Draws What the Eye Never Sees
Abstract
In ordinary drawing, seeing and moving form one closed loop inside one person: the eye corrects the hand continuously, and the two are experienced as a single act. This paper presents KAAYA (Kinaesthetic Abstract Art through Yaw and Attitude), a system that deliberately cuts that loop and gives each half to a different agent. A blindfolded artist keeps the motor half: an inertial measurement unit on the back of the hand turns the orientation of the body into paint, and nothing else reaches the canvas. A machine takes the visual half: it sees every curve the artist can never see, and interprets the accumulated trace into a finished artwork. Kaaya is the Sanskrit word for the body, and the body is the only instrument the artist is permitted. A first version of the system is built and runs end to end on an Arduino Nano 33 IoT streaming into a Unity canvas and a generative image model. This paper reports that instrument, argues that blind drawing is the limit case of a finding from our earlier work, namely that the kinematics of drawing carry more of its identity than its appearance, and specifies a second version with four extensions: a kinematic expressiveness channel, a symmetric double blindness in which the machine can also be kept blind to the artist's intention, a two regime dial that makes the delegation of interpretive agency adjustable, and a reveal ritual that places the artist's belief, the body's trace, and the machine's interpretation side by side. Authorship here is split not between human idea and machine execution but down the middle of the sensorimotor loop itself, and the paper examines what that split does to creative agency.