Boxes #1 and #2

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

William Kolomyjec

1981

Plotter Drawing

17"x36.75"

Artist and Computer

Description

Boxes I and II pay tribute to a pioneer of computer art. In these drawings, William Kolomyjec reinterprets Georg Nees’s Schotter (Gravel, ca. 1968–70), an iconic work that introduced random variables to make a program’s orderly drawing of squares to come apart in a jumble.

Nees’s composition was a descending cascade. Kolomyjec’s reworking of it shifts the orientation. In Boxes I, Kolomyjec concentrated disorder at the center, while in Boxes II, he moved it to the edges. The program introduced these variations as part of the drawing instructions, which were processed by a CDC6500 mainframe and sent to an offline Calcomp 936 drum plotter that drew the works in ink on paper.

The underlying order of the code remains visible, with each square anchored to the grid. The contrast in disruption shows how order and disorder define one another, each sharpened by the presence of an opposing force.