One Pixel
LOADINGRED PEN · LINE 024 / 048PEN ↔ · PAPER ↕Before the image, there was a question.
In 1988, a small English-language publication about fractal geometry opened a door I had not known existed.
Its mathematical forms suggested a new visual territory. I showed the publication to Carlos Alberto González Denis, a student from the Faculty of Cybernetics and Mathematics at the University of Havana who had arrived at the Instituto Superior de Arte looking for a way to collaborate with Luis Miguel Valdés’s group.
Carlos looked at the equations and told me, “This is easy for me.” I gave him a large part of my limited machine time at ISA. He began writing small programs that translated fractal equations into images; I began directing, selecting, transforming, and imagining what those images could become. The collaboration developed into Planets, my 1989 graduation thesis: a series of printed works and a short video-art piece.
The screen gave us extraordinary images. The next question was harder: How could we make them physical?
The machine printed one pixel.
The plotter at ISA was designed to draw vectors, not raster images. There was no internet, no useful technical support, and no detailed manual that could solve the problem. Carlos and I spent nights—and hundreds of hours—trying to persuade the machine to treat a point of color as printable information.
Then, one night, the plotter selected a pen, moved into position, and printed a single pixel. One pixel. We screamed like two crazy people in the empty building. It was almost nothing, but it proved that the impossible process could work.
That first mark is the conceptual center of this project: the instant when mathematics, programming, drawing, and stubborn physical experimentation became one artistic language.
Every finished image survived a fragile system.
Pens
The plotter’s tiny proprietary pens failed quickly and replacements were scarce. I asked a mechanic friend to lathe custom adapters shaped like the originals so we could use Rotring technical pens instead. I gathered every available color ink I could find at the university.
Electricity
Blackouts could stop an image after hours of printing. There was no protection and no recovery system—only the possibility of beginning again when the power returned.
Clogs
A pen could clog without warning during an overnight print. Some surviving images retain these interruptions. What might look like a flaw is also evidence of the machine, the material, and the conditions in which the work was made.
The process remains visible.
Planet I, Planet II, and Planet III preserve the direct plotter process: early computer images made physical through ink, Ingres paper, improvised hardware, limited machine time, and the uncertainty of all-night printing.
In 1992, that process moved into another print tradition. For Fractal, I produced the two color separations independently on the plotter, transferred them to silk screens, and created a limited edition with Taller de Serigrafía René Portocarrero in Havana.
Angel Torrella
Fractal research, visual development, image selection, material experimentation, printing, and the Planets thesis.
Carlos Alberto González Denis
Custom equation-to-image software and the programming work that enabled a vector plotter to produce raster-like prints.
Luis Miguel Valdés
Tutor, teacher, and leader of the experimental group at ISA that made access to the computer and this collaboration possible.
Digital art did not begin for me with effortless output. It began with scarcity, collaboration, and the joy of watching one pixel appear.