Roman Verostko (1929-2024) wrote his own computer code to drive pen plotters, producing generative ink drawings and, from 1987, works that combined plotted lines with oriental brush strokes. He called his software Hodos, Greek for "pathway," and used it throughout a body of algorithmic art that grew out of decades as a painter.,In 1995 he co-founded the artists group The Algorists with Jean-Pierre Hébert.
Verostko trained as a painter at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and in 1950 entered monastic life at St. Vincent Archabbey,where he was ordained a priest in 1959 in Pennsylvania.He earned a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1961 and later studied printmaking in Paris under Stanley William Hayter, whose semi-automated Surrealist image-making methods shaped his later interest in algorithms. After leaving monastic life in 1968 he joined the humanities faculty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1994. He wrote his first programs in FORTRAN at the Control Data Institute in Minneapolis in 1970 and that year also worked as a visiting scholar with Gyorgy Kepes at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.His first computer-generated work, The Magic Hand of Chance, was a light show written in BASIC on an IBM PC in 1982.,,
By the late 1980s he had adapted his plotter to hold a paintbrush as well as pens,following a 1985 trip to China where he met the calligrapher Wang Dong Ling, who later collaborated with him on works combining plotted lines and brush strokes.The The Algorists grew out of a 1995 SIGGRAPH panel on art and algorithms and gave a shared identity to artists who write their own code to generate images.He produced the Pathway Series, a group of multi-pen plotter drawings from 1987,,,,and Flowers of Learning, a 2006 series of text-based works installed at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.,,In 2024 his work was shown alongside Jean-Pierre Hébert's in the “Digital Poetry” exhibition at MUD Gallery in Shanghai.
In 2009 SIGGRAPH presented him with its Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2019 the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Galleries held a retrospective of his work, “Roman Verostko And The Cloud Of Unknowing”.Kate Vass Galerie began representing his work in 2023, having first exhibited him in its 2019 show “Automat und Mensch”.By 2022 he was converting some of his work into NFTs.Verostko died in Minneapolis on June 1, 2024, at the age of 94.
