Creature Tunnel

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

William Kolomyjec

1981

Plotter Drawing

22"x36.5"

Description

In Creature Tunnel, William Kolomyjec turned perspective into the main subject of the artwork. Created in the years before CAD software simplified the process of adding perspective to digital drawing, this plotter work employs the artist’s own custom code to create a sense of depth.

Kolomyjec used recurring digitized drawings in his works, including those of a goose, frog, cat, and elephant. He drew the figures by hand on graph paper, then inputted the coordinates so that the computer could reproduce them. For Creature Tunnel, he wrote a Fortran program that projected the animals onto a virtual cylinder, where they appeared multiple times at varying positions and angles. The animal outlines are recognizable at the edges but shrink into abstraction at the center. The program’s application of one-point perspective equations produces the effect of pulling the animals inward, their outlines converging to form a tunnel.