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DIAMOND LAKE APOCALYPSE SERIES
Diamond Lake Apocalypse Series, #888.n, 1992
Algorithmic pen and brush drawing
Hardware: HI DMP52 multi-pen plotter.
Artist's software18" by 24", rag paper.
By the end of the 1980’s I had come to envision my studio as an electronic scriptorium. This DLA Series was initiated in 1991 in a format reminiscent of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Each of these examples includes a pair of symmetrical brush strokes. The control points for the strokes in each work also control every pen stroke found in that work. This procedure introduces a “self-similarity” that permeates each work somewhat like a “genetic” marker.
Diamond Lake Apocalypse Series: Examples from a family of forms.
Diamond Lake Apocalypse, # 111.n, 1992
Algorithmic pen and brush drawing
Hardware: HI DMP52 multi-pen plotter.
Artist's software18" by 24", rag paper.
Diamond Lake Apocalypse, # 222.n, 1992 Algorithmic pen and brush drawing
Hardware: HI DMP52 multi-pen plotter.
Artist's software18" by 24", rag paper.
The term “apocalypse” (ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis) has its roots in a Greek term that literally means “lifting of the veil”, a kind of “revelation”. In the Christian West it generally refers to the Last Gospel of John, the “Apocalypse” foretelling the coming of “the end of time”. More broadly an “apocalypse” may be viewed as a revelation of the future.
How did these drawings come to be an “apocalypse” for me? When my pen plotter first successfully executed one of my generative drawings I experienced exhilarating wonderment. It was like a revelation or “lifting of the veil”. Clearly “form-generating” procedures could not only generate form ideas on a computer monitor; they could also drive a drawing machine and do so with tireless precision. Following years working on my “Magic Hand of Chance”, these drawings were hardly a blip on the tip of an immense wave bringing vast cultural change. Almost any problem or task whatsoever could be coded and executed with specialized machines. With this “revelation” I knew we were on the threshold of a new age. This wave would take us far beyond accounting and word processing. This was a revolution that Peter Weibel named in retrospect as the “Algorithmic Revolution”. For me, these works, drawn in my electronic scriptorium a few years later, stood for this “apocalypse”, a “lifting of the veil” in my studio overlooking “Diamond Lake”.
My studio view of Diamond Lake and my morning walks through its neighbor, Pearl Park, have served as an environment nurturing my meditation and my work in the past 45 years. See also my Pearl Park Scriptures that also grew from my studio envisioned as an "electronic scriptorium". My interest in medieval manuscript illumination underlies each work. The layout displays a page "left" (verso) and a page "right" (recto) as in the view of an open book.
– Notes by Roman Verostko, 2013
