Pathways AAB01-01.D04.1988

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Roman Verostko

1988

Plotter Drawing

Description

This work captures a pivotal moment in Roman Verostko’s career when hand-coding, traditional drawing media, and controlled randomness converged, proving that algorithms could yield genuinely expressive abstract art. After returning from China in 1985, Verostko acquired his first pen plotter machine, a HI DMP52 with fourteen pen stalls. In the late 1980s he created Hodos, custom software coded with Basic and Digital Microprocessor/Plotting Language (DM/PL) that “scored” drawings for a plotter, as a composer scores music. Pathways AAB01-01.D04 is a mature example of this process.

Holding multiple fiber-tip pens containing inks mixed in the artist’s studio, the plotter traced circuits inside a rectangular boundary. These marks were determined by an algorithm Verostko described as “form generating”— guiding the incremental turns, keeping the swarm of lines inside the boundary, and maintaining the desired distribution of color and mass. Over hundreds of passes, the lines condense into an iridescent core that fades toward the edges, creating a luminous, tapestry-like surface. The cinnabar chop, or seal, at the lower left, carved for the artist in China, affirms his connection to the East Asian ink practices learned during his visits to the country in 1982 and 1985, where he exchanged ideas with the master calligrapher Wang Dongling.