One day of honest work
This series visualizes in a straight-forward 1:1 representation, my cursor movements of one full day, plotted on paper with a Roland DG DPX-3300 vintage plotter. Only days working on freelance jobs have been used.
The work consists of many choreographies. The composition is an abstract representation of the
essence of my unconscious mind, putting my past movements onto a display. I have been taking very
detailed records of the movements I make with my mouse while using the computer, which gave me a
repertoire of multi-functional lines that represent high-entropy information, traces of the past.
Though through the extreme abstraction of these movements, the underlying intentions and actions are
blurred. The only thing left is the feeling that every line used to have an individual purpose and
has been created unconsciously, without any doubt or aesthetic aspirations.
Eventually, I realized that I needed to use human-generated data as the source. So I started
recording very detailed information about the movements of my computer cursor while operating the
machine for everyday tasks to re-purpose those traces for future experimentation. With these lines,
I, in a way, quantified my personal motoric fingerprint and had the blueprint of universal human
‘touch’ that can possibly be injected into generative systems to balance the weight of influence
between computer and human. I can conduct compositions and choreographies of ‘myself’ from a
third-person perspective and observe ‘myself’ drawing.
What drove me to this are the fascinating characteristics of the traces of minimalistic human
decision making in contrast to the deterministic qualities of mathematical functions. On the search
for possibilities to combine the advantages of generative software approaches with the uniqueness of
an individual hand-drawn line, I came to the point where I found out that it is impossible to
synthesize these human qualities with existing geometrical algorithms or mathematical functions. Due
to the deterministic attributes of mathematical functions, these are closed systems and thus
naturally disconnect from human thought and feeling. At the same time, I was not satisfied with the
idea of actually drawing myself, as this active act of intended expression blurs the overwhelming
power of unconscious decision-making and action.
You are reading and seeing the report of a point in time of that research.
One day of honest work 3/7
Black ballpoint pen
594x841mm/23.4x33.1in (a1)
hicetnunc/35066
One day of honest work 4/7
Original 80s green felt tip pen
594x841mm/23.4x33.1in (a1)
ohdow/1
One day of honest work 1/7
Black Schneider ballpoint pen
594x841mm/23.4x33.1in (a1)
hicetnunc/1092
One day of honest work
Black Schneider ballpoint pen
594x841mm/23.4x33.1in (a1)
ohdow/2
One day of honest work
Black Schneider ballpoint pen
594x841mm/23.4x33.1in (a1)
One day of honest work
Blue ballpoint pen
594x841mm/23.4x33.1in (a1)
One day of honest work
Work in progress on a Roland DPX-3300 vintage plotter