DES08X3

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Copper Frances Giloth

1980

Plotter Drawing

15"x21.5"
Signed "Copper Golith DES08X3 Sept 80"

Female Pioneer The Ragnar 100

Description

DES08X belongs to Giloth’s early “DES Series,” produced with a ZGrass UV-1 system connected directly to a pen plotter and conceived as an extension of her digital animation practice. For this project she wrote a specialized symmetry drawing program that allowed a 16-by-16 pixel image—entered via joystick—to be automatically transformed through reflection and rotation into multiple related variants, which could then be tiled, overlapped, or inverted to build larger compositions. The resulting structures draw on traditions of quilt-making and patterned floors to create complex abstractions, some of which suggest faces or landscapes.

Giloth programmed the plotter to operate like a video scan, drawing sequentially from left to right rather than using conventional X–Y coordinates, thus translating the raster logic of the CRT display to lines on paper. Because there was no preview interface, the final image emerged only through the act of plotting, and she further shaped the work by hand-mixing archival inks for successive print passes. As critics have noted, these plotter drawings probe the textures of informational media technologies: rhythmic forms arise directly from code-based commands, making the procedural underpinnings of early computer graphics visible.