I write my own algorithms in Python and let vintage pen plotters draw the results in ink on paper. Most of my machines are Roland flatbeds from the mid-eighties, built for architects and engineers. They speak HP-GL over a serial port and hold a few kilobytes of buffer. My own tooling generates HP-GL, G-code or SVG, including path optimization for the specific machine.
An algorithm usually takes weeks to develop and ends up with ten to thirty parameters controlling its behaviour. Some pieces need hours, occasionally a full day, to compute a single image. Plotting is a second round of decisions: speed, pen pressure, pen choice. I draw mostly in black, on bristol board or on original paper rolls from the eighties, with technical ink pens and vintage plotter pens, some of them modified. A forty-year-old felt tip is unreliable, but when it works it leaves something on the paper no modern pen does.
My work sits between figurative and abstract. What interests me is how readily the eye completes an incomplete image, and how much it wants to find a face. Some pieces place faces in the composition but let them show through the structure only faintly. Every line the plotter draws is exact; what the lines add up to is not. Nothing here is digital in the end – it is ink on paper, and no two sheets come out the same.
Biography
I’m Algorigraph, and I make generative plotter art: ink on paper, drawn by machine, generated by code.
Every work starts with a custom algorithm I write myself. I build each system from scratch for a specific visual idea, and every run produces a result that exists only once. A pen plotter then draws the piece physically, line by line. That physical act matters to me: pressure, ink flow and the mechanics of the machine leave traces the code cannot fully predict.
My work is featured in “Tracing the Line – The Art of Drawing Machines and Pen Plotters” (Vetro Editions / Generative Hut), which presents 100 contemporary artists shaping the international pen plotter scene, alongside pioneers such as Vera Molnár and Manfred Mohr. In 2024 I exhibited successfully at HAAM.
For HAAM 2026 I would bring large-format framed one-of-a-kind pieces, and small editions of 5-20 works in A3. Even within an edition, no two drawings are identical – the plotting process itself makes every sheet unique.