Hans Dehlinger — Early plotter works

1972

Artists: Hans Dehlinger · Year: 1972 · Medium: Plotter drawings — dense compositions of algorithmically-placed pen strokes · Substrate: German mainframes; custom FORTRAN programs; Calcomp and later Hewlett-Packard plotters · Place: Kassel, Germany · Institution: Gesamthochschule Kassel (later Universität Kassel) Hans Dehlinger began producing computer-based plotter drawings at Kassel in 1972 and has continued for more than five decades. His work is formally distinct within the Stuttgart-adjacent German tradition: where Nees's Schotter and Nake's Hommage à Paul Klee work with geometric primitives, Dehlinger's drawings are typically composed of dense fields of short pen-strokes — hatched, overlaid, varying in direction and density — that build up compositions with a surface character closer to etching or drawing than to geometric graphic design. The aesthetic reads as algorithmic mark-making rather than algorithmic composition. Dehlinger's method is conceptually distinctive. He programs algorithms that generate large numbers of individual strokes, each with its own parameters, that accumulate into a composition where the algorithm's decisions are visible at the stroke level rather than at the composition level. This is a different proposition from Schotter's clearly-visible rule-structure. Dehlinger's rules are legible only in aggregate; each individual stroke looks decided rather than determined. He has been an unusually sustained pedagogical figure, teaching at Kassel for four decades and supervising numerous doctorates on computer-based design. His practice has continued through the shift from plotter to digital-print technologies, and his recent work has extended into NFT distribution. He is still working. Lore Hans Dehlinger trained as an industrial designer at Ulm's HfG — the influential postwar German design school descended from the Bauhaus — before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley in the early 1970s, where he encountered American computer-graphics research. He returned to Germany in 1973 and held a chair at the University of Kassel for three decades. Dehlinger's wife Beate, an art historian, has been the primary curator of his archive; the two have lived in Kassel since the 1970s. Dehlinger declined several offers from major American universities, on the explicit grounds that the German academic environment supported sustained contemplative work in ways the American one did not. He continued to produce plotter drawings well into his eighties; the most recent works in the Kassel archive are from 2023. Sources • Dehlinger, Hans — dehlinger.de • Universität Kassel — design faculty archive • DAM Projects — Dehlinger monograph