Daniel Catt, who publishes as Rev Dan Catt, is a contemporary print artist who writes computer code to generate compositions for drawing machines, traditional print, and sometimes screen. He acts as “instigator and curator”, selecting or feeding the code's output back into the system, while the code, technology, and drawing machine, with its pens and ink, take on the role of “creator”.
Since 2024, Catt has pursued a year of arts-based research into synthesised handwriting, AI-assisted journaling, and the running of an art studio, driven by a wish to automate the laborious parts of studio administration.That research led him to build Kitty, an AI personal assistant that transcribes voice notes recorded around the studio, manages his to-do lists, and writes in a synthesised handwriting style of her own so that notes stay legible.
For The Sea Howls From The West, Catt built a generative system that selects from a palette of dark and light fountain-pen inks, sorting outputs into variants he named Stormy, Evening, Morning, and Daytime depending on how many dark inks appear, then plots them as SVGs for the drawing machine.He also reimplemented the landscape-generating algorithm of the BBC Micro game The Sentinel, which has fascinated him since he first played it in 1986, in JavaScript after its annotated source code was released, outputting the results as Riso prints and drawing-machine plots.,
His project FALLiNGWATER, which includes a soundtrack released on Spotify, was also produced as a series of Riso prints.In 2023, his work was featured in “N=12”, a group show on Feral File curated by Aaron Penne that brought twelve artists across seven time zones into ongoing dialogue with one another.
