User:Alessia/Plotter art
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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, hypnotic. Nowadays sadly disused, replaced by large-format inkjet printers, or led toner based printers.
Most recently we are experiencing, not just into the xpub bubble :) , a re-discovery of pen plotters within the thriving generative art community.
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.
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)
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.
photos: Graphomat Z64, punch tape, 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 is the biggest manufacturer of pen plotters, their first plotter was the 9125A flatbed plotter, introduced in 1968.
Their HP 7470, in the 80s, introduced the grit wheel mechanism (still used in inkjet based large plotters), at opposite edges of the sheet press against polyurethane coated rollers. The pen was mounted on a carriage that moves back and forth in a line between the grit wheels.
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
photos
-Calcomp 565
- Stromberg Carlson SC-4020, 60s http://noll.uscannenberg.org/PDFpapers/40204360.pdf
-example of pantograph
-grit wheel mechanism
-create a card Kiosk from the 80s
photos
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)