Technically, the first plotter I ever saw was a piece of lab equipment. In physics class we had an X-Y recorder: a device built to draw voltage over time, half-dried felt-tip pen on that endless paper with the perforated edges. Then someone connected two oscillating signals and it drew Lissajous figures: perfect loops and knots that nobody had designed. And nothing about them was random. They followed directly from the interplay of two simple signals; change the frequency ratio, and you get a different knot. The thought stuck: simple rules can produce images. It took me the better part of two decades to act on it.

The ground had been prepared a few years earlier, in a computer club in fifth grade. We learned programming with Niki, a little yellow robot on a screen that you could command around a grid: forward, forward, turn left, pick up the ball. You could also give him rules and watch him follow them. Giving instructions to a machine and watching them play out: that one stuck, too.

By the way: hello. I'm Fabian Eck. If you've seen my work before, you probably know me as algorigraph: algorithm plus -graph, as in drawing with algorithms. Art came first. I've been drawn to it for as long as I can remember. The computer science came later, and it's what turned me from someone who looks at art into someone who makes it. This site is where the two finally share an address.

Between Niki and now lies a long stretch of almost doing things. I spent years reading RepRap blogs without ever building a 3D printer: fascinated by the machines, missing a reason to own one. The reason arrived when affordable XY plotters hit the market. I bought an EleksMaker. I told myself it was a hands-on project to brush up my Python. Mostly, it was to justify the purchase. The Python got brushed up. The project never ended.

It also escalated quickly. Within months I ran into the EleksMaker's technical limits and started looking around for what else was out there. What I found were vintage Roland plotters from the mid-eighties: machines like the DXY-1200, built for architects and engineers, available second-hand for very little money. These machines are remarkable in two directions at once. They can do things no modern hobby plotter can: automatic pen changers, electrostatic paper hold, proper engineering throughout. And they can't do things modern machines take for granted: they speak HP-GL over serial ports, and their buffers hold a few kilobytes at best. More capable and more limited at the same time. For me, that's exactly the balance where things get interesting. The constraints push back, and the work gets better for it.

Today my studio holds a small collection of these machines. The oldest were built a few years before I was born.

What do I make with them? My pieces live somewhere between figurative and abstract. What fascinates me is how the brain completes incomplete images, and there is nothing it would rather find than a face. In some of my pieces I play with exactly that: I place faces in the composition, but let them shine through the shapes only vaguely, hinted at rather than drawn. The balance I am after sits between the machine and the image: every line the plotter draws is exact. What the lines add up to is not.

For a while, I went quiet online. Not because I stopped plotting, but because a feed that scrolls past in a second never felt like the right place for work that takes hours to draw. So I built this site instead: my own space, on my own terms, with room to grow. I've been working on a few new algorithms recently, and I'm looking forward to showing the results here first.

Which brings me to this journal. Here's what you can expect: portraits of the machines (each of these plotters has enough character for a post of its own), looks under the hood of specific pieces and the algorithms behind them, notes from exhibitions I visit or take part in, and whatever else turns out to be worth writing down.

Welcome to algorigraph. At its core, this site is still that physics classroom: rules go in, images come out. The rules have become more complex since then. The fascination has not.