User:Alessia/Plotter art

Personal essay evolved after an informal presentation about pen plotting to some unsuspecting friends, zulip messages, a birthday dunch and insomnia

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What is even a pen plotter?

> Can I say that it sounds funny as a name? plotter
> Oh wait I saw them on tiktok there are plenty of videos of these m a c h i n e r i e s
> Yes, kinda trending

They are iconic devices, magical pioneers of digital graphic reproduction, machines that left an indelible mark in the history of visual art + computer graphics and in each of our hearts. Even if sadly pen plotters were replaced by large format inkjet printers, we are now experiencing a new renaissance for them, even outside the xpub bubble. With such nostalgic appeal they attract even more. Artists from all over the world acclaim them again as their new favourite tools, to be safeguarded, cherished, resurrected.

Modern digital plotters, which are still in use today, evolved from analog XY writer plotters that operated along two axes of motion, making it the most efficient way to draw vector graphics, not then raster, so just blueprints, graphing data, large format maps…

> I don’t understand, weren't you doing things with the radio?
> pen plotters look even scarier than computers I swear

Now some historical facts! 🖼

One of the earliest plotters was Konrad Zuse's Graphomat Z64 in 1958, a punch card controlled plotter, driven by two gears. Frieder Nake, THE Algorist (along with Vera Molnar, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, and Manfred Mohr) used this machine, for which he developed a fancy software for his experimentations.

One of the first mechanical and commercial plotters 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.

> luckily you are showing images I wouldn’t understand a thing without them
> damn diabolic m a c h i n e r i e s

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

The great change for pen plotters arrived with the crafting of the flatbed plotter. As the name suggests, the surface to be drawn on would be laid out flat, differently than before, as paper was rolled up on a drum. HP was the big guy for commercial plotters. HP's first plotter was the 9125A flatbed plotter, introduced in 1968.

Again HP, The HP 7470, born in the 80s, introduced the grit wheel mechanism, at opposite edges of the sheet press against rollers. The pen was mounted on a carriage that moves back and forth in a line between the grit wheels.

Fun fact, plotters were also used in Create-A-Card kiosks, to make little postcards, that were available for a while in supermarkets. They used the HP 7475 six-pen plotter.

The most used modern pen plotters at the moment are the one from AXidraw by Evil Mad Scientist Labs, their firmware is open source: https://github.com/evil-mad/axidraw.

> I’ll still use my hp printer
> I don’t understand how this is connected to the radio

I am done, done, let's speak about art c’mooonn.

Firstly, Pen plotter art: is it really art?

There isn’t much about plotter art in general, in books or on the internet. Grouping people together is always a way to ghettoise them, what does it even mean being a pen plotter artist? Is there any kind of typical philosophy that is embedded to practising art through this kind of machine in particular? Each artist brings their unique perspective and creative approach to the intersection of art and technology, art romantically is creativity but in the real world art is money, we saw this in the fascinating rise of NTF that stained pen plotter art as well :)  

>NFTs are still a thing?

I got to discover (from An Interview with Frieder Nake by ‍Mark Amerika https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/an-interview-with-frieder-nake ) that THE algorists even if they were programmers, they still had people writing codes for them, which makes me smile, remembering all those great personalities, artists whose names are printed into history books, whose real artistic production is reduced to the bone, maybe even less. Who knows how many works of art have been created without the author, to whom they are attributed, moving the brilliant hand just to sign them, while studio cadets sweated over fresh canvases, in this case over keyboards.

> uuh we are getting into the social critique part now. spicy.
> like my internship you mean. I feel this.
> Idk, maybe they were paid this time, not enslaved like renaissance boys

                                                                               

I have prepared a very long list of names, all contemporary artists, as I wanted to find mainly artists that are still involved in the art scene, who have jumped from the bank of computer science to the bank of visual art, falling into exhibitions, museums, glossy newspapers superficial interviews. I don’t really want to show it anymore. It is a very different world from our studio or from those that see pen plotters perhaps in a more sincere, curious, way of rediscovering forgotten tools. I also wonder how much my own gaze is directed at the art industry more than at the creative act itself, there would be too much to say. I will not tell you about this whole list, just some hints.

> but can the plotter do other stuff other than plotting?
> maybe make food? Sing a song?
> what’s the point of making something do what it is expected to do?

                                                               

Generative art! Talking 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 mathematicians, scientists, and programmers to push that immaterial boundary between art and science.

Mafred Mohr, Vera Molnar Frieder Nake, George Ness, Herbert W Franke, are all great science-computer-artists that experimented with generative art and visualised their ideas through pen plotting. It’s interesting to see how pen plotting built a bridge between new digital computer technologies and traditional printmaking techniques, I am speaking about dirty hands, acids, and staining inks getting at some point linked to the cold grey plastic reality of computer hardwares. A whole new world.

Pen plotters, as computers, weren’t really naturalised, common to have around, Mohr had to use the ones from the Paris Institut Météorologique. I imagine what the guys there would have thought about this person using their machinery, for art???

New languages had to be created. Other remarkable pioneers of pen plotter art still included under the generative art umbrella: Harold Cohen, Mark Wilson, Peter Beyls, Roman Verostko, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Casey Reas.

A lot of exhibitions, a lot of thirst for recognition.

I get the feeling that all these artists just seem to have attempted to create randomness and chaos without actually creating it, some sort of extreme seek of control over that human desire for chaotic disorder. Randomness by computer is still perceived as the total antithesis of randomness by humans, but is it even like that? Or is it just because we still can’t acknowledge all the different logical motives and reasons behind our own?

> that’s too philosophical, show us some weird things

Most of artists explore the intersection between human-machine interactions (Sougwen Chun), even seeing them even as conversational (LIA), they focus on dynamic-fluid-esoteric forms and structures to get over the feeling of rigidity and inflexibility of the pen plotter involvement (Alida Sun), they let plotters be performative devices and storyteller creating spaces that aim to enhance even just human interactions (Jürg Lehni-Jessica In), they create illusory fake organic structures, playing between harmony and chaos (Tyler Hobbs - Zancan), self-build frankenstein punk machines with paintball guns (Antigoon), work on data visualisation and sound design (Peco). There are so many artists out there that are involved in the pen plotter art, but if I may, in a quite superficial way. The machine is the machine and it will draw the generated artwork. But isn’t there something more?

It’s somehow sad that plotters have been regarded merely as tools, peripheral tools, Yet, how 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 a quasi-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 :)

There is something mystical, enigmatic, about how pen plotting challenges what is the conventional notion of what drawing as an act is.

Drawing is viewed as an inherently human process, we are quite proud of it. Art history is based on that epic moment when some guy decided to draw hunting scenes and drugged shaman dances inside caves. We glorify the act of visual creation. The endlessly repeating of that act by the plotter alters that sense of sacredness that arises from the artist's personal touch, it makes some existential insecurities emerge.

Let’s embrace this! Let’s embrace a vision of the plotter as a machine that disrupts, kind of adds that transgressive element into the artistic process that is so much needed.

Is it still ok to go on? Usually it is the end part, in a presentation of this type, that tries to be all nice and pompous and glossy, is the grand finale, so get to the end.

After having inspiring conversations about pen plotting with both Thijs and Manetta, that I thank deeply, I would say I may have get a little bit entangled in my typical flat bullet point fine art analysis, like I would speak about traditional artists or established art movements (even if art is not established at all, movements don’t even exist in the real sense of things).

I would say xpub experimentations got a bit over my head while I was exploring all those generative art shiny online exhibitions. Maybe I should speak more about what pen plotting is for us as a community of students, and what might be.

Pen plotting was indeed a great community tool shaping for us. It became the glue that let us stick together more in the studio and let us know more about each other, how cheesy!

As we are all from different backgrounds we let machines be our companions in what is our own personal digging into experimental publishing, media archeology, skill building, tool making, performing acts, all done collectively. A plotter culture is emerging, it surely is.

I tried for so long to destroy that wall between me and pen plotting as a technical tool, only thanks to the skills and energy of my classmates I did partially succeed. Perhaps my role is to rant, more or less, silently about the techno-philosophical-exciting aspects of (lovely) metal boxes.

As I believe our xpub bubble is a bubble but still influenced by the outside world, I am looking forward to connecting with other bubbles, conquering the world together or something. There must be life out there!

Thanks to:

Stefano, Edoardo, Thijs, Manetta

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