Marcel Schwittlick

Marcel Schwittlick

Marcel Schwittlick (b. 1989) is a prolific Berlin artist who works with some of my favorite machines in the world — the HP pen plotters of the 1980s — and I've had the pleasure of meeting him in Berlin a few times. He owns more than forty vintage plotters and drives them with self-developed algorithms, turning recorded human cursor movements into physical drawings: "I sample from something that is human-made rather than purely random." He came to the work with both halves of the training — media computing at HTW Berlin, then art and media at UdK — and he prizes the machines' imperfections over their precision; some pieces can never be repeated because a buffer overflow made them possible, and the sound of the plotting is part of the work. His Composition series returns hand-drawn, digitally sampled lines to paper; his luminograms expose photographic paper in the darkroom with a plotter-guided laser.

Artist's website (schwittlick.net) ↗

5 physical works