Ken Wiatrek, known as kenconsumer, is an American artist based in Berlin, Germany.,He combines hand-drawing, digital techniques and machine-driven plotter processes in an ongoing exploration of existence built around Being Anything, deliberately blurring the line between human and mechanized production.,
Wiatrek earned his art degrees in the mid-1990s before working in the anime industry, where he served as Director of Marketing at ADV Films and helped bring Japanese animation into the American mainstream. He relocated to Europe in 2008.Wiatrek is a Founding Tender at tender.art, founded and directed SP2 Contemporary in Berlin, and contributed to The Texas Firehouse in New York.,He also hosts the podcast Arbitrarily Deterministic, which explores conversations between art, technology and popular culture.,,
His 2023plotter work Protection Was Good began with shapes finger-drawn on a laptop trackpad, which he expanded using the coding tool Processing, reassembled in GIMP and Inkscape, and finally traced with a pen plotter in inks and acrylics on archival paper.In February 2025, Galerie Met and Verse presented his series STRIPDE in Berlin, a body of pen-plotter works released as an edition of seventeen 1-of-1 pieces that drew on the stripe patterns of CRT television imagery alongside references to video games, Nintendo and Monet.,,For the group exhibition “(Land)scape” in Berlin in November 2025, he showed AAT Rd1, which turns the repetitive cycle of human and machine labor into landscape, drawing on the history of the Mechanical Turk to highlight the invisible labor and ambiguous authorship behind automation.In his 2026 series Names of Places I Have Never Heard, he combined plotter-generated structures with painting, drawing, collage and layered interventions, treating painting as a form of cartography that transforms architectural and technological imagery into imagined terrains suspended between recognition and uncertainty.
