Daniel Catt

Artist

Daniel Catt · 70spop.love ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/daniel-catt ↗

Based

Lives and works in Shrewsbury, UK

Practice

Generative systems, contemporary printmaking, pen plotting, drawing machines, and process-led research

Now

Leads CATT PRINT: Research & Development, an arts-based research studio in Shrewsbury

In the set

80s Pop Variety Pack - for experts only 🕹 ↗ · 366 editions
70s Pop Series One ↗ · 256 editions
70s Pop Series Two ↗ · 256 editions
70s Pop Super Fun Summertime Bonus Pack 🍸 ↗ · 64 editions
70s Pop Ghost Bonus Pack 👻 ↗ · 64 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Daniel Catt’s practice begins with a productive division of agency. He devises rules, evaluates results, and redirects promising variations, while code and drawing machines execute, repeat, and introduce contingencies. In his 2024 artist statement, Catt describes himself as the instigator and curator of a process in which software, technology, pens, ink, and machines assume much of the work of creation.¹ This is neither a claim that the machine is independently artistic nor a defense of automation as efficiency. It is a studio method built around feedback, selection, and the aesthetic consequences of delegated action.

That method links his digital collections to a broader contemporary-print practice. Catt writes JavaScript systems that produce SVG files, then sends those files to pen plotters through an AxiDraw command-line workflow.² The apparent immediacy of an on-screen image therefore sits beside the duration of a drawing machine tracing lines across paper. His work asks what changes when an algorithm can generate a composition faster than a printer or plotter can materialize it, and how imperfect production can interrupt the promise of exact computational reproduction.³

The five AB[500] collections gathered here record a concentrated chapter in that inquiry. Their serial titles evoke commercial packaging, compilation albums, bonus material, and decades organized as styles. Their grids, saturated colours, and playful parameters also test how strongly a generative system can establish family resemblance without collapsing individual outputs into sameness.

Pop as a rule set

70s Pop Series One was released by Art Blocks on 7 April 2021 as a collection of 256 editions.⁴ Its title proposes the 1970s less as a historically complete decade than as a portable visual grammar. Rounded forms, stripes, tiled divisions, and assertive palettes recall the period through design signals that can be recombined. Nostalgia here is procedural. Rather than reproduce a single poster or textile, Catt builds conditions under which numerous images can feel retrospectively familiar.

This distinction matters. The collection does not merely imitate vintage surfaces. It translates graphic cues into variables, allowing proportion, line, fill, orientation, and density to negotiate each composition. The output is recognizable as part of a series, but its identity arises from the interaction of parameters. Catt’s earlier account of working with computers describes precisely this kind of collaboration: artist and machine guide one another toward results neither fully specified at the outset.⁵

Live on Art Blocks: 70s-pop-series-one-by-daniel-catt ↗

Variation, continuation, and the bonus pack

Released on 13 June 2021, 70s Pop Series Two comprises 256 editions.⁶ The sequel format turns continuation into an explicit artistic problem. A second series must remain legible as part of the same world while creating enough difference to justify its existence. Catt approaches that problem through controlled expansion. The vocabulary persists, but additional combinations and altered emphases make seriality itself visible. A collection becomes not a closed inventory of images, but one stage in the development of a visual system.

The two 64-edition supplements sharpen this logic. 70s Pop Super Fun Summertime Bonus Pack 🍸 and 70s Pop Ghost Bonus Pack 👻 borrow the language of seasonal promotions, novelty compilations, and add-on content. Their modest edition counts distinguish them from the two principal series, while their titles loosen the sober terminology often attached to computational art. Humour becomes part of the interface between system and audience.

That playfulness also carried a material social consequence. Contemporary reporting by The Link states that Catt donated all primary-sale proceeds from the summertime and ghost projects to Women Who Code, raising a combined $28,000.⁷ The bonus-pack device consequently operated on several levels: as an extension of a generative family, as a knowingly commercial form, and as a fundraising mechanism. The works’ light tone does not preclude institutional or ethical purpose.

Live on Art Blocks: 70s-pop-series-two-by-daniel-catt ↗

Live on Art Blocks: 70s-pop-super-fun-summertime-bonus-pack-by-daniel-catt ↗

Live on Art Blocks: 70s-pop-ghost-bonus-pack-by-daniel-catt ↗

From seventies memory to eighties interface

80s Pop Variety Pack - for experts only 🕹 extends the project into a different field of remembered media. Released on 17 August 2022, it contains 366 editions.⁸ The expanded supply is significant. It gives the algorithm more room to demonstrate range, while the phrase “variety pack” makes multiplicity the collection’s declared subject. The joystick in the title shifts the historical reference toward interfaces, games, and screen culture.

Across the ten examples shown here, repetition acts as a comparative tool. Each image can be read independently, yet the grid encourages attention to transformation: changes in segmentation, chromatic balance, spatial rhythm, and the relative dominance of graphic elements. The work’s historical evocation resides not in any single motif but in the cumulative effect of variations. The eighties emerge as a model of designed experience, bright, modular, and mediated through electronic display.

The qualifier “for experts only” is comic, but it also describes a mode of looking. Expertise in a generative collection is acquired through comparison. Viewers learn the system by encountering many outputs, recognizing common structures, and locating exceptions. Art Blocks’ collection record presents all 366 works as unique, emphasizing that the project exists simultaneously as code, editioned population, and set of individually owned outputs.⁸

Live on Art Blocks: 80s-pop-variety-pack-for-experts-only-by-daniel-catt ↗

The screen and the studio

Catt’s later work confirms that these collections belong to an ongoing negotiation between digital image and physical process. A 2024 studio visit presents him as a contemporary printmaker, pen-plotter artist, and educator whose practice combines mathematics, technology, and design.⁹ The studio contains drawing robots, papers, pens, and inks, material evidence that an algorithmic artwork need not be confined to a display. In Catt’s account, the digital and physical are intertwined rather than opposed.

His 2023 FALLiNGWATER project revisited mid-1990s graphic design and an imagined Windows 95 nostalgia through generative variation, connecting software history to print and poster design.¹⁰ In 2024, Trance Atlantic Glide drew on Swiss design grids and Late Modernist form and colour.¹¹ These projects clarify the broader trajectory already evident in the AB[500] works. Catt does not treat historical style as a fixed archive. He extracts organizational principles, submits them to computation, and asks how many credible presents can be generated from remembered visual pasts.

The significance of the five Pop collections lies in this conversion of cultural memory into operational structure. Their approachable colours and comic titles can initially disguise the seriousness of their method. Yet each series stages questions central to generative art: where authorship sits, how variation becomes meaningful, how a collection establishes coherence, and what happens when visual history is encoded as a space of possibilities. Catt’s answer remains deliberately practical. Write the system, run it, observe it, select from it, and allow screens and machines to return unexpected forms.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Daniel Catt links page ↗.