Lucas Rehnman on Composition #100

Composition #100 is a series of new automated plotter-made artworks. As with Schwittlick's other Compositions' series, Composition #100 uses recorded cursor lines as its fundamental basis.

Computers cannot create unpredictability from nothing because its operations follow deterministic laws. Since it is a closed logical system, it can only transform information according to mathematical rules. There is no room for spontaneous or unpredictable behavior: it cannot invent randomness, only simulate it. To access true unpredictability, it must look beyond its own calculations and sample the physical world.

Knowing this, and in contrast to orthodox generative art, Schwittlick uses human-drawn cursor lines as data rather than conventional pseudo-randomness. He has set out to create unpredictable, high entropy-containing images, well exemplified by this new body of work. "No two cursor lines are the same, they are each unique, unrepeatable". The cursor lines' high entropy and the fact that they come from a human gesture are the artist's subtle homage to the individual and the bodily, against the impersonal and purely capitalistic dimensions of our present world. For him, human intent always surpasses the cold and unintentional (pseudo-)random. This is the underlying meaning of the cursor lines.

Schwittlick has been seeing himself more and more as a concrete artist than a generative one. Concrete art doesn't tell a story but asks the onlooker to engage directly with its material and structural reality. Individual outputs in themselves are not so important: instead, the process and the production of large series of work are the spheres in which both artist and audience engage in an auto-examination of one's own visual perception's functioning and of “inherited and learnable abilities".

Within Schwittlick's art, Compositions are series of works. He numbers each, aiming at reinforcing that individual pieces are part of an ongoing sequence of actions or ideas. That is, an individual piece always belongs to a larger family of works. Thus, Schwittlick numbers his series of Compositions to emphasize repetition and process and approaches art-making as an ongoing system rather than the mere creation of isolated objects. Over time, the linear sequence of Compositions (1, 2, 3…) forms the coherent structure of his practice. The philosophical concept of Gestalt is useful here, since it means a bigger frame that encompasses relationships. "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Departing from a curiosity in human eyes' perception of colors and their relationships, Schwittlick's guiding concept for Composition #100 was to fill the paper with color.

The artist wanted to understand how color works, how they interplay with one another and, also, how they are perceived digitally, physically, by the human eye in contrast to machine "perception", and according to different resolutions and distances. It was, in a sense, an empirical, pointillist research. The physical-digital translations, however, were a rather chaotic, playful and curious-driven process than an obsessively lab-controlled one, and, in addition, have also revealed theoretical dead ends (one can say that there is a gap between color theory and color practice).

The cursor lines database is an archive of vector lines. When it comes to vector graphics, shapes are represented mathematically and thus can be rendered at any scale. A pixel, on the other hand, works differently: they are colored dots in a regular grid that makes up a digital image. Vector graphics offer several advantages in comparison to the pixel: resolution independence, mathematical exactness, editability and efficient rendering. They preserve the procedure that generated the image, something pixels can't do. A vector file is not merely a picture, but a set of instructions.

In Composition #100, everything derives from the geometry of the cursor lines, which lay the foundation for each drawing.The data that is fed to the algorithm determines the final output. Non-cursor lines would have resulted in very different works. In Schwittlick's art, thus, at a fundamental level, the choice of input data determines the aesthetic and conceptual character of the work. (Artistic) freedom is not the absence of constraints but the ability to generate something unexpected, despite the constraints.

The artist of interest, following Vilém Flusser, is one who searches for non-obvious paths, pushes the boundaries of the system (set of rules) and produces results unforeseen by the "program", and by himself. What's special about art is not only the consistency of results, but the changes- the exceptions, the subversions, the outliers, the anomalies. Schwittlick's Compositions reveal that ordinary actions, such as mouse movements, contain unexpected aesthetic potential. Unnoticed gestures of everyday life can be transformed into something aesthetically puzzling.

Lucas Rehnman, 2026

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Composition #100