Aros is Aros is Aros

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Sture Johannesson

1989

Silkscreen

Description

Produced within Johannesson’s EPICS project (Exploring PICture Space), developed with IBM engineer Sten Kallin, these works probe the emerging capabilities of 1980s imaging software to construct layered pictorial environments and illusions of depth. Algorithmically generated forms—esoteric glyphs, geometric bars, and radiant bands—are stacked, shaded, and haloed to test how discrete digital elements might coexist within a single spatial field. Multicolored lines, gradients, and electrostatic textures produce an animated sense of pulsation, suggesting that depth can be simulated not through perspective alone but through the accumulation of layered signals.

Created using high-end digital imaging tools at IBM’s Image Handling Facility in La Hulpe, the prints translate computational compositing into the material language of silkscreen. Johannesson treats software not merely as a means of image generation but as a conceptual framework for picture-making, exploring how symbolic forms—such as the glyph shaped like a standing stone above a five-pointed star in Aros is Aros is Aros… or the nested rectangles and chromatic bands of IBM Malino—can be structured to evoke shifting spatial hierarchies. Together, the works exemplify Johannesson’s sustained inquiry into early digital graphics systems and how they expanded printmaking’s capacity for the simulation of dimensional space.