Andre Masson used the technique and did so under different psychological states induced by sleep deprivation, for example.
Automatic drawing and writing is also used to 'channel' spirits in mediumship, where a guide takes over a host to mediate communications from the other side. I think that to attempt allow the subconscious to take over from consciousness will produce unexpected groups of patterns and forms and will lead to a subjective interpretation based on what may or may not appear on the paper. These could be interpreted as messages from a spirit entity, but this is purely subjective. I think it would be very difficult to even make any kind of mark on a surface without some conscious will to do so, and by this I mean that even if we try to detach ourselves completely from the task we will still influence the conduct of the instrument. If messages appear, then they only do so after we consciously project a meaning onto them.
The ability to see forms in what are completely random surfaces is a particular quality of being human.
Pareidolia which is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.
When I was young, much to my parents annoyance, I used to peel the top surface of my bedroom wall paper away to reveal what I imagined were images of monsters, faces and that kind of thing.
We find order in chaos and this is not because meaning is there it's because we are looking for it. This may be because recognition of basic human features, primarily the physical structure of the face, has an evolutionary benefit of allowing us to easily identify friend and foe among other things. the face is obviously also one of the biggest ways we communicate feelings, especially before speech is developed.
Austin Osman Spare was arguably the first artist to use automatic drawing and he had links with the occult as a one time associate of Aleister Crowley. Spare experimented with automatism as part of his ideas of manipulating his own self consciousness.
'The objective understanding, as we see, has to be attacked by the artist and a subconscious method, for correction of conscious visual accuracy, must be used.'FORM MAGAZINE Vol. 1 No. 1, April 1916
http://hermetic.com/spare/auto_drawing.html
I see the benefits in automatic drawing exercises much as the Surrealists, that it has the potential to unlock some ideas which may become the basis for further rational development.
