30.09.2026
Who Is the Author When a System Draws?
When I work with a pen plotter, the most important question for me is no longer whether the machine can draw a precise line. It can. The question is where authorship actually sits when I do not physically make that line with my hand.
I design the rules. I decide the coordinate space, the logic of repetition, the permitted deviations, the order of operations and the moment when the system must stop. Sometimes I define color relationships; sometimes I allow an algorithm to choose within a constrained palette. The machine then converts those decisions into movement. A pen touches paper, follows a path and leaves a physical trace.
At first glance, this seems to distance me from the artwork. I experience the opposite. The further I move from direct manual execution, the more responsibility I have for the structure that produces the image. In traditional drawing, a decision can happen in the fraction of a second between eye and hand. In algorithmic work, I often have to make that decision explicit. I must turn intuition into a rule.
This is one reason I am interested in modern geometric abstract art. Geometry exposes the system. Repetition, intervals, orientation and proportion are visible rather than hidden behind representation. In geometric line art, even a small change in a rule can reorganize the entire field. A line shifted by a few millimeters may change rhythm, density and visual tension across the whole work.
For me, contemporary geometric art becomes especially interesting when the system is not merely used to reproduce a composition I already designed. I want the system to participate in discovering the composition. I want to establish a space of possibilities and then observe which image emerges from it.
That changes my understanding of the artist. I am not disappearing from the process; I am moving to another level of it. Instead of deciding the position of every mark, I decide how positions may be generated. Instead of drawing every relation, I create the grammar from which relations can form.
This is also why I resist treating a plotter as a printer. A printer is expected to reproduce a finished image. My interest is in building a machine-mediated process in which the final image is still unresolved when execution begins. The physical result can become geometric abstract wall art, but the artwork, for me, starts earlier: in the system of constraints, probabilities and mechanical actions that makes that result possible.
Perhaps authorship in algorithmic art is not located in the hand, the code or the robot separately. Perhaps it exists in the architecture of decisions that connects all three.
I design the rules. I decide the coordinate space, the logic of repetition, the permitted deviations, the order of operations and the moment when the system must stop. Sometimes I define color relationships; sometimes I allow an algorithm to choose within a constrained palette. The machine then converts those decisions into movement. A pen touches paper, follows a path and leaves a physical trace.
At first glance, this seems to distance me from the artwork. I experience the opposite. The further I move from direct manual execution, the more responsibility I have for the structure that produces the image. In traditional drawing, a decision can happen in the fraction of a second between eye and hand. In algorithmic work, I often have to make that decision explicit. I must turn intuition into a rule.
This is one reason I am interested in modern geometric abstract art. Geometry exposes the system. Repetition, intervals, orientation and proportion are visible rather than hidden behind representation. In geometric line art, even a small change in a rule can reorganize the entire field. A line shifted by a few millimeters may change rhythm, density and visual tension across the whole work.
For me, contemporary geometric art becomes especially interesting when the system is not merely used to reproduce a composition I already designed. I want the system to participate in discovering the composition. I want to establish a space of possibilities and then observe which image emerges from it.
That changes my understanding of the artist. I am not disappearing from the process; I am moving to another level of it. Instead of deciding the position of every mark, I decide how positions may be generated. Instead of drawing every relation, I create the grammar from which relations can form.
This is also why I resist treating a plotter as a printer. A printer is expected to reproduce a finished image. My interest is in building a machine-mediated process in which the final image is still unresolved when execution begins. The physical result can become geometric abstract wall art, but the artwork, for me, starts earlier: in the system of constraints, probabilities and mechanical actions that makes that result possible.
Perhaps authorship in algorithmic art is not located in the hand, the code or the robot separately. Perhaps it exists in the architecture of decisions that connects all three.
SKVO
