Courtesy of https://www.kimsangsoo.com/

Wolfgang Kiwus

Wolfgang Kiwus (1939, Celle – 2022, Stuttgart) came to the plotter late and on his own terms. Trained as a musician at the conservatory in Wrocław and the Musikhochschule Stuttgart, he built electronic instruments in the 1960s, wrote poetry, radio plays, and essays, and worked as a journalist and literary editor. As a young man in Stuttgart he attended Max Bense's lectures and saw the very first computer-art exhibitions — Georg Nees and Frieder Nake, 1965 — but, as he later put it, was unable to take part then. Sudden hearing loss in the early 1980s ended his music; he retrained as a data-processing clerk and in 1985 began writing his own image-generating programs — first for the screen, then dot-matrix prints in 1986–87, and from 1991/92 the pen plotter. He was a purist about it: computer artists, for him, were those who program their own pictures, not those who use software as a tool, and some of his drawings literally encrypt Bense's 1946 essay into graphic form. He exhibited alongside Frieder Nake, Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, Georg Nees, and Herbert W. Franke — Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2001), ZKM (2004, 2018), Tama Art University Tokyo (2006), Kunsthalle Bremen's Ex Machina (2007), DAM Berlin (2013) — and won first prize in the 1993 PRISMA Preis für Computerkunst of the Hamburg Cultural Foundation.

Artist's website (damprojects.org) ↗

1 physical work