Wolfgang Kiwus

Wolfgang Kiwus was born in 1939 in Germany. He studied flute at a music school in Wrocław and from 1954 to 1958 played in the Philharmonia Wrocławska. After moving to Stuttgart in 1959, he studied contemporary music at the State University of Music and Performing Arts, later founding the Contemporary Music Studio in 1963. Alongside music he wrote poems, radio plays, and essays, many produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. He worked for a time as a machine builder in broadcasting, and in 1978 founded a small publishing house in Italy. Following a sudden hearing loss in the early 1980s, he retrained in data processing and began teaching himself programming, a shift that opened the path to computer art. 

Kiwus began creating computer works in the mid-1980s, first on screen, then with dot-matrix printers and pen plotters. He rejected standard software and insisted that true computer art comes from writing one’s own programs. For him, the innovation of computer art lay in the way images could be generated linguistically, out of nothing, as concretizations of ideas. His practice was shaped by the philosophy of Max Bense, particularly the essay Der geistige Mensch und die Technik, and by long friendships with Frieder Nake, Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, Georg Nees, and Herbert W. Franke. He treated programming as a form of composition, extending his background in experimental music into visual processes. Many of his works encrypt texts, transforming language into dense, layered graphic fabrics that hover between calligraphy and abstraction. For Kiwus, encryption was exact and closed, while decryption opened into an expansive field of interpretation. His use of rigid drawing machines such as printers and plotters meant teaching these devices an elegance and suppleness they did not naturally possess, refining their mechanical limits to reveal new graphic possibilities. Generative art, in his view, was concerned with regulation, process, and the balance of precision and sensibility. He described computers as tools for simulating structures of thought, capable of revealing new aesthetic orders.

He began exhibiting his computer works in the late 1980s, first in Interface II in Hamburg and later at the Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung in Bonn.His work was included in major survey shows including Die Algorithmische Revolution and bit international at ZKM Karlsruhe, 20th Century Computer Art: Beginnings and Developments at Tama Art University Museum in Tokyo, and Ex Machina – Frühe Computergrafik bis 1979 at Kunsthalle Bremen. He presented solo exhibitions including per vorschrift und per prozess at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and PRECISELY PREDETERMINED at the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, and his legacy was honored in the commemorative show Out of the Attic at DAM Projects in Berlin. His distinctions include the JPT Förderpreis Computer Art in 1986, a literary stipend from the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in 1989, third prize in computer graphics in Karlsruhe in 1992, and the first prize of the PRISMA Award for Computer Art from the Hamburg Cultural Foundation in 1993. Kiwus passed away in 2022.