【1981 Archives】

We're frequently981 Archivesthe lookout for a quiet corners of the internet. You know – places to take refuge from the often chaotic online world.

One such corner is the the delightful #PlotterTwitter community, where artists, programmers, tech enthusiasts, and more share their neatest generative art made using different models of plotter printers, which work by physically moving a pen across paper.

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A quick scroll through the #PlotterTwitter hashtag turns up delightful examples, including one from game developer Matthew Wegner that garnered more than 17,000 likes and put #PlotterTwitter on the map. In Wegner's clip, his pen plotter draws one of 336 teeny cat doodles on a large sheet of paper.

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In another clip from Wegner, the plotter draws small sketches of a stick figure performing "Warm Up Stretches" all across the page.

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Wegner said via Twitter DM that he uses an AxiDraw V3 pen plotter for his projects, a machine that, as he says, "has its own weird charm."

"Like, everyone has a printer, and I could have just printed the faces," he wrote. "But somehow plotting them with a pen changes everything. Maybe because I could hold a pen and do the same thing myself? A lot of plotter art invokes the weird 'did a crazy person make this' repetition of lines and elements."

Other frequent contributors to the #PlotterTwitter hashtag offer sleek, geometric designs and intricate patterns. One regular poster, a software engineer named Michael Fogleman, started selling his plotter drawings online – created with an AxiDraw V3 – after they attracted interest on Twitter.

"There's a nice little community that has formed of people who share these interests," he said via email. "One thing that's interesting is the different types of hardware. Many of us use modern hobbyist plotters like the Makeblock or AxiDraw while others use vintage hardware from the '80s, usually HP brand plotters that were actually used for e.g. engineering drawings back then. And yet others build their own from scratch. Some of those work vertically, where the drawing head hangs from two strings and it draws onto a wall."

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While #PlotterTwitter is a space for sharing, Fogleman says frequent contributors don't simply copy one another's work. Rather, they borrow tips and tricks from one another to help strengthen their individual pieces.

"Within the community folks share their work and their code," he explained. "Most of the code that is shared are utilities. Things that make it easier to communicate with the hardware, things that make the plotter draw paths in a more efficient order, etc."

Across #PlotterTwitter, though drawing styles and methods vary, much of the work shares a common, almost meditative thread. See some of the coolest recent pieces the hashtag has to offer, below:

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