Composition #92 (Luminogram)

Marcel Schwittlick has been exploring how algorithms can be employed in artistic work. Often going from digital to analog and back again, in restless feedback loops, he is now experimenting with the technique of plotter-luminograms, a cameraless photography technique. In his luminograms, the photographs are made by the paper’s exposure to a laser light navigated by an algorithmically-controlled plotter in a darkroom setting. After the laser-light’s choreography is recorded by the light-sensitive silver halide emulsion, the photo paper is developed normally by the artist, just like regular analog photographs.

The series is a playful yet systematic exploration of the potentials of generative art and concrete photography. The main characteristic of concrete art is that it is non-figurative, anti-anecdotal and it is premised on aesthetic autonomy, signifying nothing other than itself. It is an art form that wants to free perception from any a prioris, aiming at opening up new possibilities for rational categories of aesthetic apprehension – an approach that invites us to practice our abilities to decode, differentiate and recognize form and classes of meaning. It brings new perspectives on forms, form relationships and visual orders into consciousness.

Black, white and shades of grey resonate in the mind of the beholder: there is no message. Just like colour, concrete photography is irreducible. The colour black leads only to itself – and also to the whole universe. A signifier that leads to another signifier, this is Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, the delta of the modern, of the search for the sign-based self-awareness of art. Schwittlick’s luminograms, like any successful achievement in form and colour, are there to facilitate our demolishing of the common misconception that “beauty” and “art” are subject to be defined or taken for granted as complete systems or defined categories. Putting us to work, these images gently invite us to become more conscious of our inherited and learnable abilities.

• Lucas Rehnman