Calendrier permanent I

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Gerhard Kammerer-Luka

1984

Portfolio

Description

Calendrier Permanent (Permanent Calendar) is a series of serigraphs after plotter drawings, the remarkable fruit of the long-term collaboration between artist Gerhard Kammerer-Luka and computer scientist Jean-Baptiste Kempf.

The pair’s collaboration began in 1972 with their cofounding of the “Groupe Art et Ordinateur de Belfort,” whose goal was to establish the creative possibilities of art and mathematics. Intended for use as a calendar, the series is based on a portfolio of plotter drawings titled Formes en Generation (Forms in Generation). These were likely made during Kammerer-Luka’s time, from 1977 to 1979, at the Centre Pompidou’s pioneering Atelier de Recherches Techniques Avancées (ARTA)—where for the first time he had access to a plotter as well as powerful computing equipment.

In a statement accompanying the portfolio, Kammerer-Luka and Kempf explained that the series was part of a “systematic study of the random generation of polygonal forms.” Here, random line shifts create new forms within a simple structure of 100 horizontal lines. They described the resulting series as “both varied and coherent, like the twelve months of the year.”