Petrus Wandrey was a German artist, born 8 March 1939 in Dresden, died 5 November 2012 in Hamburg. He founded Digitalism and proclaimed it in 1978 at Fordham University in New York. At the core of the work stand large constructions assembled from the hardware of the digital age: circuit boards, heat sinks, laserdiscs and chip plots, mounted on panel or standing free.

Digitalism is the stylistic tendency in the visual arts that uses the characteristics of digital representation and is therefore the formal language of the digital epoch. The definition is Wandrey’s own. Bazon Brock fixed the point in 1995: “What concerns him is the gestalt-appearance of digital processes and their technologies; it is not about image production by computer.”

Digitalism carries surrealism into the digital age. Wandrey met Eduardo Paolozzi in 1961, who praised surrealist collage as a new kind of shocking and surprising art. Magritte reached him through Esquire in 1964, Dalí soon after. From that ground he took the human body as his subject and showed it under the spell of the digital, wired, masked, fitted with interfaces, and he read the social change that followed from the hardware itself.

Wandrey travelled to Port Lligat in 1975 and gave Dalí the sculpture Venus’ Wind for his 71st birthday. Dalí answered: “You have not given me, but Surrealism, a great gift.” He added that Surrealism was the invention of his own generation, and that Wandrey must create a new direction in art for his. Wandrey returned to Hamburg, cleared the studio and destroyed many works.

Five facts carry it. He named and defined a style in 1978 and held to it for 34 years. The jagged contour was in his hand from 1967, drawn before any studio tool produced it. He was the first artist admitted to the Philips chip development centre and worked its plots as pictorial ground. He drew the networked body with interfaces in 1994. Works stand in the Dalí Theatre-Museum and at the ZKM.

In 1978 at Fordham University in New York. The Institute for Scientific Humanism had invited him through the dealer Ben Birillo to make a picture. He worked six weeks in the city and produced Science and Beyond, the first digitalist work he put before a broad public, and proclaimed Digitalism on presenting it.

The mask portrait of 1967, made for the academy festival LiLaLe, sets two mouths in the place of the eyes. In 1968 he drew a computer mask as an illustration for Capital magazine. The jagged contour was in his hand ten years before he gave it a name, and it came out of surrealist collage.