Marcel Schwittlick (b. 1989) is a Berlin-based artist who uses vintage pen plotters and self-developed algorithms to translate digital, cursor-drawn geometry into tangible, physical drawings. His practice embraces the plotting machines' quirks and unpredictability alongside his own control over the process, adding an auditory dimension through the distinctive sounds the machines make while drawing.
His interest in computer art began in his teens, when he discovered the work of Frieder Nake and Manfred Mohr and started coding in Processing.He studied media computing at the University of Applied Sciences Berlin from 2010 to 2013, and later returned to study art and generative art at the University of the Arts Berlin from 2019 to 2022.
Between the summer of 2020 and spring of 2022, largely during Covid-19 restrictions in Berlin, he made Upward Spiral, a series of 144 drawings produced on a custom-built machine that translates digital geometry into a continuous spiral movement. Each drawing took nine hours and used a solid paint marker in one of twelve colors, and the series totals 144 pieces, every possible pairing of the twelve.For Composition #83, shown in 2023 in “Odysseys”, an exhibition curated by Verse at Cromwell Place in London, he plotted 512-by-512 grids using 262,144 individual pen hits, a technique that pushed his plotters toward the pixel-based logic of printing.,He extended that technique in Composition #84: The Long Run, six large-scale plotter drawings made in 2023 by emptying a collection of thirty-year-old vintage felt-tip pens no longer in production, each piece taking roughly a day to complete and built from about two and a half million individual dots. Three of the six were shown that year at SP2 Gallerie in Berlin.
In 2024 RRose Editions published cursor, a monograph of his work. That year he also took part in a group show at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, and in 2025 at Yale University's Center for Collaborative Arts and Media.In 2025 the Belvedere Museum in Vienna gave him a solo exhibition, “Viewfinder”, and he showed Composition no. 99 in the group exhibition “Groundwork” at Heft Gallery in New York.,
