About the Collection

I grew up inside the software business my family ran from 1981 to 1985, in a living room regularly full of programmers and hackers bent over Apple II+ and Commodore 64 computers. Before I was an entrepreneur I was a puppeteer, a photographer, and an art teacher in Seattle Public Schools, and I spent that decade haunting the city’s galleries and museums. Then I turned to building tools for creative people — first as a founder of MakerBot, now with Bantam Tools.

In 2016, at DAM Gallery in Berlin, I saw works by Casey Reas, Vera Molnár, and Mark Wilson, and something clicked. I began collecting computer art seriously — and, around the same time, collecting the machines that made it, especially HP pen plotters from the 1980s, which I also draw with in my own practice. Collecting the artworks and the tools together deepened my fascination with the physical traces of computation: ink on paper, machine movement, plotted lines, and the human choices behind automated processes.

From 2022 to 2024 I dove into the fxhash generative art community, collecting NFT-based works with a particular interest in pieces that can cross from the digital world into the physical one. The collection now spans eras — from early plotter drawings and pioneering algorithmic works to generative art being written today.

The collection is tangled up with my work on creative machines. In 2023 I pointed Bantam Tools at the challenge of building contemporary art machines, and in 2024 we merged with Evil Mad Scientist, joining two companies that care about exceptional tools for artists, educators, and innovators. In 2025 we launched Machine Arts magazine to amplify artists making work with computers and machines. The collecting and the tool-building feed each other.

This is a collection I live with, not a vault. There’s room on my walls for about fifty or sixty framed pieces, so works rotate through yearly — up from the flatfiles, into the light, and back — and the rotation keeps the collection a daily conversation rather than an archive.

If you made this work, knew someone who did, or are caring for an artist’s archive, I would love to hear from you. I’m always interested in the stories and histories around these works, and the collection supports research and exhibition loans. Write me through the contact page or at hello@bre.art.

Thank you to Jacqueline Gares, who obsessed over the collection, the photography, and the assembly of the data on this website. This project couldn’t have gone from a bunch of artwork in flatfiles to a framed and properly archived collection without her dedication and skill.

This website was made with the help of Claude Code by Bre Pettis, who hasn’t been a professional website maker since the days of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. The content was created by either Bre Pettis or Jacqueline Gares, often with the help of ChatGPT or Claude Code.

While we have endeavored to make every description of the artwork factual, if you find errors, we really really want to fix them. Please email errors and suggested improvements or reference resources to hello@bre.art.