Untitled (letters)

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Gerhard Kammerer-Luka

1978

Plotter Drawing

13"x11"

Description

Linear marks that hover between writing and drawing recur throughout the work of Gerhard Kammerer-Luka, reflecting a sustained fascination with language as a visual system. In Untitled (Letters), these marks coalesce into forms that resemble glyphs from an unknown alphabet, suggesting writing unmoored from meaning yet still governed by structure.

A professor of German at the Institute for Technology in Belfort, France, Kammerer-Luka began working with computers in 1972 after meeting the computer scientist Jean-Baptiste Kempf, then a visiting lecturer teaching Fortran. Their collaboration was rooted in a shared concern with language and text as both medium and subject, and the computer offered Kammerer-Luka a means of systematically generating and transforming letter-like forms beyond the constraints of handwriting or typography.

This plotter drawing was produced during Kammerer-Luka’s residency in Paris from 1977 to 1979 at the Centre Pompidou’s Atelier de Recherches Techniques Avancées (ARTA), an influential workshop founded in 1975 by Christian Cavadia to give artists access to computers and advanced plotting equipment.