User:Alessia/Plotter art

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/6924/1/COMP_thesis_Armin_2012.pdf!!!! https://www.artvisor.com/artvisors-guide-to-digital-art/!!! https://paleotronic.com/2020/06/02/paleotronics-light-pens-and-plotters/!!!

🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧

intro

Pen plotters are iconic pioneers of digital graphic reproduction, magical devices that left an indelible mark on the history of design, visual art, computer graphics and engineering.
Wonderful tools, extremely satisfying to watch, amazingly hypnotic, they are vector printing devices. Nowadays sadly disused, replaced by large-format inkjet printers, or led toner based printers.
In today's art world, a fresh wave of artists is enthusiastically adopting pen plotters again to delve into the realms of algorithmic aesthetics, generative design, and the fusion of art and technology. Their exploration ranges from intricate line drawings to immersive installations, pushing the limits of the medium and erasing distinctions between the analog and digital realms, as well as between handmade and machine-generated art.

Modern digital plotters, which are still in use today, evolved from analog XY writer plotters, output devices designed as precision measuring instruments and output devices for analog computers. The XY writer was a plotter that operated along two axes of motion, making it the most efficient way to draw vector graphics.

Historically, plotters were made with practical applications in mind like drafting blueprints, graphing data, or drawing large format maps, offering the fastest way to produce very large drawings or colour high-resolution vector-based artwork when computer memory was too expensive and processor power was too limited.

Pen plotters were very time consuming and difficult to use, users often found themselves concerned about the ink in their pens running dry If one pen dried out at the end of a plot, the total plot had to be redone most of the time. In spite of these limitations, the extreme resolution and colour capability of pen plotters made them the favourite output device until the late 80’s.

A number of printer control languages were created to operate this kind of machine, to transmit commands to move the pen itself. Three common ASCII based plotter control languages are HP-GL, the successor HP-GL/2 and DMPL.

History + Models

One of the earliest plotter was Konrad Zuse's computer-controlled Graphomat Z64 in 1958, a punch tape or punch card controlled plotter, driven by two gears.
It was used for fully automatic plotting for geodesy, meteorology and road construction. A remarkable artist that used this particular machine for his works was Frieder Nake, who explored computer art in the 60.

File:Photo to add Graphomat Z64

File:Photo to add punch tape

File:Photo to add example of Pantograph

File:Photo to add homage to Paul Klee, Nake (1965)

One of the first mechanical and commercial plotter was the CalComp 565 from 1966, a drum plotter that worked by placing the paper over a roller that moved the paper back and forth for the X motion and the pen moved back and forth for the Y motion.

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/calcomp/CalComp_Software_Reference_Manual_Oct76.pdf

A key hardware piece for the development of CAD applications is the Computervision's Interact I, it used an attached ball point pen to draft pantographs (mechanical drawing aid based on parallelograms). It was really slow and required a lot of space, it was anyway useful as a digitizer (processing information to a digital format).

Another type of plotter was the flatbed plotter. instead of wrapping the drawing surface around a drum, they laid it out flat. This was a preferred type of plotter for cases where you needed to see the whole piece while it being plotted.

Tektronix produced flatbed smaller plotters between the 60s and 70s for “home-use”, they were popular for desktop business graphics and in engineering laboratories, their pens were mounted on a travelling bar.

Hewlett Packard was the biggest manufacturer of pen plotters, their first plotter was the 9125A flatbed plotter, introduced in 1968.
Their HP 7470, in the 80s, was the world's first small format paper moving plotter (the advantages are higher speed and lower costs) that coudl switch between 8 pens. The chosen pen was mounted on a carriage that moves back and forth in a line between the grit wheels.

Other important mentions: ColorPro, DraftPro and the 7600 series (electrostatic plotters)

Plotters were also used in the Create-A-Card kiosks that were available for a while in the greeting card area of supermarkets that used the HP 7475 six-pen plotter.

Another interesting application of the plotter magic was that of the electronic or microfilm plotters. They worked in a similar way as the mechanical plotter, but instead of a pen they used electron beams and instead of paper microfilm.
The first known computer animation was created by the SC-4020 titled “Simulation of a Two-Gyro Gravity Gradient Attitude Control System” by E. E. Zajac, 1965.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBlQb6Me_1k&ab_channel=UltimateHistoryofCGI

File:Photo to add Calcomp 565

File:Photo to add Stromberg Carlson SC-4020, 60s

File:Photo to add example of Pantograph

File:Photo to add grit wheel mechanism

File:Photo to add create a card Kiosk from the 80s

Plotter are still versatile tools due to their ability to produce large-scale prints across various media types, they are still used for POP adverts in supermarkets, data visualisation, other niche application of plotters are braille embossers, used to create tactile images on special thermal cell paper, vinyl cutters (that still use HPGL language), and writing-homework-machines
https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/entertainment/tech-gaming/article/3060907/chinese-schoolgirl-caught-using-robot-write

After 2000 artists began to rediscover pen plotters as extragavant, customizable devices, even if the support for driving pen plotters directly or saving files as HP-GL has disappeared from most commercial graphics applications. Vermes is one of the last companies that makes pens for all HP pen plotters, even the earliest models. Usually pen plotters use fiber pens, but ball-point plotter pens are sometimes available, with refillable clear plastic ink reservoirs.

Modern day plotters used by artists around the world include: the AXidraw (flatbed plotter) by Evil Mad Scientis Labs, its firmware is open source: https://github.com/evil-mad/axidraw.
(lista instagram)
https://blog.dbalan.in/blog/2019/02/23/resurracting-an-hp-7440a-plotter/index.html

making art

There is something mystical, enigmatic, about how pen plotting challenges what is the conventional notion of what drawing as an act is. Traditionally, drawing is viewed as an inherently human process, the endlessly repeating of that act by the plotter alters that sense of sacredness that arises from the artist's personal touch and intention. The plotter as a machine that disrupts, kind of adds that transgressive element into the artistic process.

It’s somehow sad that plotters have often been regarded merely as tools, peripheral tools, Yet, how interesting wonderful the moment when a symbiotic relationship is built between the materials involved and the human action of letting the machine being a companion more than a device, boundaries blur, and the machine assumes an almost autonomous presence in the artistic process. A dynamic of interplay while welcoming complexities and material vulnerabilities that working with this kind of machines involves.Maybe even embracing the unexpected as a sort of performative act. Could this be seen as fetishization? Probably.
Anyway it was Nake one of the first that signed his works with NAKE/ER56/Z64 acknowledging the computer system and plotter as integral collaborators in his artworks.

Because of the computer’s great speed, freedom from error, and vast abilities from assessment and subsequent modification of programs, it appears to us to act unpredictably and to produce the unexpected. In this sense, the computer actively takes over some of the artist’s creative search. It suggests to him syntheses that he may or may not accept. It possesses at least some of the external attributes of creativity Noll-The digital computer as a creative medium
https://monoskop.org/images/7/7b/Noll_A_Michael_1967_The_digital_computer_as_a_creative_medium.pdf

The discussion about the legitimacy of recognizing hardware/software as authors, giving them a characteristic of humanity, is still very much open, now more than before. If the machine produces the artwork is it the only legitimate author?
It seems that James Pyle, from CalComp, seems to have thought so, when he held an international art competition where plotters had to be the main tools used. Most of the art pieces didn’t have any attribution to the human artist involved in the creation of the pieces, just to CalComp :)

Writing about pen plotter art without mentioning computer and generative art is impossible. Pen plotters undeniably played an important role in the evolution of both these art movements, as they were among the earliest digital tools available to artists, and before them to mathematicians, scientists, and programmers. Their labs became places of great collaborations, one of those field collisions happened between Katherine Nash, professor of art, and Richard Williams, professor of computer engineering: they developed the programming language ART 1 (original Processing), surely a game changing approach to software and art creation. One of the first computer art exhibitions, that featured pen plotter generated artworks, was held at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in the 1960s. The exhibition included artworks from two Bell Labs researchers, Michael A. Noll and Bela Julesz. Bell Labs was all about pushing boundaries, encouraging the development of new softwares that could be used beyond scientific purposes to art as well.

A. Michael Noll, Gaussian-Quadratic, 1963 (made), 1970 (printed), Photographic print, 28 x 21.8 cm. Image courtesy of V&A Museum, London Charles Csuri, Sine Curve Man, 1967 George Nees, Polygon of 23 Vertices, 1964 CalComp advertisement, 1969, Computer History Museum

Manfred Mohr was a precise mathematical logic artist, his style was objective. He used photogravure from pen plotted drawings in his artistic process, highlighting the role of pen plotting as a bridge between a more material printing technique approach typical of traditional photochemical processes and the new digital revolution of computers technology. His style was typically that of writing random variables to allow the computer to choose the end result. As computers and plotters were difficult to own at the time he used the ones from the Paris Institut Météorologique

Frieder Nake, he followed a scientific approach to aesthetic, something that it’s quite popular around the pioneers group of generative art. He, as well, used plotter drawings to produce screenprints and fed computers with random values, He is Professor of computer graphic in Bremen.

George Ness, involved with the existential rationalist Max Bense, worked on multiple graphic libraries using ALGOL language to control the famous Z64, he played a lot with randomness, order and disorder. He was the first generative computer graphic artist to participate in the 1965 exhibition at Stuttgart College titled Computer Graphik, one of his works there: Polygon of 23 vertices.

Herbert W Franke used plotter drawings as tools to produce serigraphies and silk prints (as in the case of Algebraische Kurven). He realised a series of works entitled KAES (aesthetic curves), that Peter Henne programmed and manipulated, then generated through a Siemens 4004. He is the co-founder of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz.

Vera Molnar was a radical experimental artist, she was fond of repetition, inspired by Malevich and Mondrian, as well as variation, geometric abstraction, clash between order and chaos. She referred to her algorithmic programmes as machine imaginaire.She worked with Fortran.

Another significant plotter artist is Charles Csuri. For his Sine Curve Man, from 1967, he used IBM 7094 (with punch cards) connected to a Calcomp 565 drum plotter to produce his self-portrait, which is claimed to be the first example of digital morphing (distortion by marking key points) and one of the most complex figurative computer generated art. This artwork was part of Cybernetic Serendipity, the first international exhibition of electronic cybernetic and computer art that took place in London in 1968.

Other remarkable pioneers of pen plotter art include: Harold Cohen, Mark Wilson, Peter Beyls, Roman Verostko, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Casey Reas.

Edward Zajec, RAM 13, plotted with a DP-1 plotter on an IBM 1620, written in FORTRAN IV Frieder Nake, Matrix Multiplication, 1967, plotted using a graphomat plotter Mark Wilson, SkewR34, 1983 Joan Truckenbord, Coded Algorithmic Drawing #9, 1975, CalComp plotter and FORTRAN Grace C. Hertlein, The Field, CalComp plotter, ink nylon and brushes

AxiDraw / fresh new plotter artists:


0 Alida Sun https://cryptoart.io/artist/alidasun
An intersectional futurist based in Berlin. She is into esoteric interdisciplinarity forms, fluid dynamics, crystals and mythology. "Glitch Crystal Monsters on the Art Block" is the result of 777 :) days of exploration of generative art.Through this work, Sun focus on fluid and transformative potential inherent in structures often considered rigid and inflexible.

0 Sougwen Chun 愫君 https://sougwen.com/
Chinese-Canadian artist pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. Her artwork "MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2)" has earned a place in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, marking the first instance of an AI model being acquired by a major institution. She was recognised as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum and recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in AI for TIME's .

1 LIA https://www.liaworks.com/
Australian artist pioneer of software and net art. She works with video, installation, sculpture, performance and projections. Her concept of artwork is fluid, filled with vivid coloured abstract forms, as she is trying to grasp signals from the subconscious mind of her viewers. She views the interconnection between machine and artist as a conversation. She runs a vegetarian food blog as well.

2 Jürg Lehni https://juerglehni.com/
Swiss artist, designer, software developer, and plotter engineer! He worked on Paper.js, Scriptographer and Vectorama.org.
His large scale chalk drawing machines are probably his most famous works, named Hektor, Rita and Viktor, sketch, Lehni explained how they were builded to “break out” of the computer monitor.
There is something familiar and childlike about how these machines operate. Being placed on a large blackboard one is catapulted back to elementary school days. As they are machines that adjust their position in mid-air anyway very often their mark, the lines they produce, are not perfect, this brings a natural, almost freehand drawing style that is often not present within the production of plotter art.
“All these machines are performative devices. People love watching them doing their work, and it’s as much about the final drawing as it is about the drawing in creation, where there’s a sort of storytelling happening.”
3 Tyler Hobbs https://tylerxhobbs.com/
A professional programmer :) from Texas, he’s into iterations ,organic structures and chaos. He gets inspiration from natural elements creating hybrid paintings and collaborating directly with the plotter in the creation of the artworks. He uses Clojure, Java and Processing. With his works he includes signed printouts of the source codes.

4 Zancan https://zancan.art/
He’s interested in the richness of nature’s complexity and trying to move away from a stereotypical vector appearance. His works subjects are mainly visual symbolism and harmony through dense pattern of foliage and trees. He worked in Rifugio Digitale, in Florence in 2023, where he participated in the transformation of a former WW2 air shelter into a digital art exhibition space (Sheltered Landscapes).
5 Joanie Lemercier https://joanielemercier.com/
Glitch artist, focused on complex algorithmical drawings that could take even more than 24 hours. He creates unique ID / codes for each of his pieces, to control tracks of his works and help with the auction speculations issue.

6 Jessica In (Shedrawswithcode) https://www.jessicain.net/pagesdwc
Architect, designer, creative coder and educator, from Australia.
In her researches she delves into the integration of programming to architectural drawing. Beyond she applies her knowledge to create music videos and virtual environments.

7 Frederik Vanhoutte https://winterbloed.be/
A physics Ph.D. working as a medical radiation expert in Belgium. During the nighttime, a creative coder, walking on the fine boundary between art and science, functionality and beauty.

Other interesting pen plotter artist out there:
Julien Gachadoat https://v3ga.net/
Rev Dan Catt https://revdancatt.com/
Lars Wander https://larswander.com/
Arno Beck http://arnobeck.de/0
DiDiffArt https://www.didiffart.de/
Pablo Azócar (Pavlovpulus) https://pavlovpulus.com/
Targz https://targz.fr/
Matt DesLauriers https://shop.mattdesl.com/



Acrylcode Berlin (Felipe Infantino), Algorigraph (Fabian Eck), Antigoon, Frank Aubry + Andreas Rau, Barbe Generative Diary (Peco), Martin Bauer, Arno Beck, Deniz Bicer, Chris Bly (machine.arm), Bondtruluv, Geoffrey Bradway (Chromatocosmos), Bustavo (Gustavo Muñoz), Joel Cammarata, Dan Catt (Revdancatt), CEK (Giorgio Cecatto), Michelle Chandra, Sougwen Chung (Studio Scilicet), Desmond Clarke , Andee Collard, Dirk Dallas (Dirka), Matt DesLauriers, DiDiffArt (Diana Becker), The Dot Is Black (David Mrugala), Kristine Erstad Vegard, Julien Espagnon, Allen F, Sven Björn Fi, Hiromasa Fukaji + Horikawa Junichiro, Julien Gachadoat (v3ga), Pablo Garcia , Generative Artworks, Kjetil Golid (Kgolid), Greweb, David Guerrero, Cory Haber, Licia He, Tyler Hobbs, Matthew Hughes, Jessica In (Shedrawswithcode), Ralf Jacobs, Jenslabs (Jens Clarholm), JMY (Jimmy Herdberg), Floris de Jonge, So Kanno + Takahiro Yamaguchi, Simon Kirby, Daniela Kröhnert, Guillaume Lagarde (Entropismes), Land Lines Art, Beatrice Lartigue (Lab212 Collective), Tom Lauerman, Sunjoo Lee + Ko de Beer, Jürg Lehni, LIA, Loackme, Lenia Mascha, Simone Mauer, Kyle McDonald + Matt Mets, Arjan van der Meij, Liz Melchor, Huw Messie, Emre Meydan (Thresfold), Mmachine, Cezar Mocan, Moodsoup (Stefan Reyniers), Ivan Murit, Sohan Murthy, Kris Northern (phidelity), Noumenal, Dimitri Otxa, Pierre Paslier, Pavlovpolus (Pablo Azóçar A.), Abe Pazos Solatie, Arnaud Pfeffer, Playmodes, Paul Prudence, Paul Rickards, Meg Rodger, Con Ryan, Catalin Sandu, Heliodoro Santos Sánchez, Lisa Schwalbe (Gridtheline), Marcel Schwittlick, Seohyo (Seo Hyojung), Sfd.Art (Andreas Schönfelder), Luke Shannon, Shih Wei-Chieh , Spatial Matters (Nicola Lorusso), Strano (Marcel Giannoccaro), Studio Joanie Lemercier , Studio Strauss , Alida Sun, Maksim Surguy, Targz, Tofa (Christopher Noelle), Patrick Tresset, Frederick Vanhoutte (Wblut), Benjamin Vedrenne, Lars Wander, Victor Wong, Zancan.
http://www.horst-zuse.homepage.t-online.de/z64.html https://computerhistory.org/ https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Howard_Wise_Gallery_Show_of_Digital_Art_and_Patterns_(1965):_A_50th_Anniversary_Memoir (Computer Program for Artists: ART 1 Katherine Nash, Richard H. Williams) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1572264

https://www.academia.edu/7599752/Digital_pioneers_computer_generated_art_from_the_V_and_As_collections

http://www.horst-zuse.homepage.t-online.de/z64.html https://computerhistory.org/ https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Howard_Wise_Gallery_Show_of_Digital_Art_and_Patterns_(1965):_A_50th_Anniversary_Memoir (Computer Program for Artists: ART 1 Katherine Nash, Richard H. Williams) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1572264

languages

HP-GL
HP-GL stands for Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language, and it's basically a set of commands created by Hewlett-Packard to control their pen plotters. Initially, it was specifically for HP plotters, but now it's become the go-to standard for many CAD programs and plotters out there. standard command.
In HP-GL the coordinates are at the center. The language allows negative coordinate values.
HP-GL/2, which is much more powerful and efficient, has become the standard.
example of HP-GL script drawing a line:

SP1;                 (Select Pen)
PA500,500;           (Plot Absolute, x/y coordinates)
PD;                  (Pen Down)
PR0,1000;            (Plot Relative, units in y direction)
PU;                  (Pen Up)
SP;                  (Select Pen - back in the stall)

HP-GL/2
Unlike its predecessor HP-GL, which was tailored for pen plotters, HP-GL/2 introduces advanced drawing functionalities specifically oriented to raster plotters. Moreover, HP-GL/2 extends its capabilities beyond HP-GL by offering several additional features like enabling printing in color or grayscale, ability to print data containing both vector and image data, creating files that are 2 to 5 times smaller.. HP-GL 2 places the coordinate origin at the top left corner of the page and does not support negative coordinates (in absolute mode).

NP = number of pens (pens are numbered from zero, not one)
PC = pen color (0 white, 1 black, 2 green, 4 yellow, 5 blue, 6 magenta, 7 cyan)
PW = pen width

HP RTL
HP RTL is a graphics language created specifically for rendering image data, (bitmaps). Basically, image data consists of dots that form a visual representation. When integrated with line drawings created by a standard plotter, this combination allows for vivid illustrations. In particular, HP RTL facilitates fast drawing processes by compressing large image data for efficient output, allowing for high-speed rendering.