Rulemart

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Paul Rickards

2024

Plotter Drawing

Description

Paul Rickards’s Rulemart makes unconventional use of an everyday printing technology: the thermal receipt printer.

Rickard collects (and, if necessary, repairs) vintage and second-hand electronic output devices, then uses them to print generative artworks produced with code he writes in Python. While his main focus is vintage pen plotters from the 1980s, he occasionally experiments with other devices such as dot-matrix and, in this case, thermal printers. The designs are printed on different kinds of papers as well as nontraditional substrates such as floppy disks.

Rulemart began as a way to test a used thermal printer. The generative pattern is based on the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram’s famous study of cellular automata. “I like the patterns it makes so much I began printing them and including them free in packages of plots that folks purchased,” Rickards explains. “A receipt of purchase of sorts, but art instead."