Untitled

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Wolfgang Kiwus

1993

Plotter Drawing

21.25"x25.5"

Description

This untitled drawing is an early example of Wolfgang Kiwus’s plotter works, made when he was shifting away from dot-matrix prints.

Kiwus believed that computer art could only exist when artists wrote their own code. In the 1990s, he worked in Pascal, building programs that defined how the plotter would draw.

Untitled is part of his series of drawings that transformed Max Bense’s essay Der geistige Mensch und die Technik (The Spiritual Man and Technology) into encrypted character strings. His programs converted the text into signs for the plotter to trace. The characters cannot be read because Kiwus deliberately broke the sentences into coded fragments. The eye searches for words but finds only patterns, realizing Kiwus’s goal of moving perception beyond text into visual order.