Set of 3 Generative Plotter Drawings

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Paul Rickards

2024

Plotter Drawing

Generative art drawn with vintage pen plotter with sharpie marker on blank light gray 5.25″ floppy disk

Description

The disks in Paul Rickards’s “Floppy Disk Series” are both canvas and archive.

Asteroids Homage (Open Edition) is a set of three generative plotter drawings on 5.25″ floppy disks. Rickards used a vintage pen plotter fitted with a black Sharpie marker. The program generated the design as a sequence of plotted paths, which the machine inscribed directly onto the disks’ surface. Once the drawing was complete, the same files that produced it were saved to the disk itself, turning the artwork into both a record of the process and the storage medium of the data that propelled it.

Each disk bears a distinct design composed of triangles of differing sizes and orientations. Parallel lines run through each triangle, in varying degrees of density to produce tonal shifts. In the corner of each disk, a cursor-like form appears to eject a line toward the center. This directs the eye to the drawing while highlighting the physical features of the disks, such as their circular hubs, and Rickards’s use of them as elements of the composition.