Pinot The Book

It is a book of artworks by the pixel artist, freehand illustrator, stopmotion animator and retro technology enthusiast Wahyu Ichwandardi, known as Pinot. If there is one word that motivates IDEA and makes us desperately want to publish a book it is TALENT. Pinot has so much talent (and uses it so positively and beautifully and, let's be honest, curiously) that we could not even begin to consider not making this book!

Pinot can not just draw. He can draw (and paint and animate) on Nokia phones, PalmPilot, ZX Spectrum, Apple Mac classics, Nintendo games consoles (Mario Paint!)... on anything that can be very painstakingly programmed basically. The work takes days and weeks... and the result? Adorable, simple and charming and cute and massively super cool!

In June 2022, Pinot suffered a pontine hemorrhagic stroke, was in a coma for two weeks and had a very low-percentage predicted outcome of either surviving and / or living a normal life. That episode is perhaps best illustrated with this Instagram reel. A stroke survivor, Pinot doesn’t stop creating. Learning to use his non-dominant hand, he keeps working with his Amiga 1000 (1985) and Macintosh Plus (1986) to craft pixel art as part of his recovery therapy.

Pixel by pixel.

A quote from Pinot before you see how amazing the book is:

I’m grateful that this book finally arrives in your hand. I hope it inspires you in the sense that everyone can be creative regardless of the circumstances, financial capabilities, or technological tools. Pencil, paper, pen, and pixels are my main tools. In whatever way, it’s all a matter of idea, a God’s gift that you should nourish and grow. I admire old technology that has taught not only me, but also my children about “the process” and for being thankful to the “instantaneousness” of the modern ones. It makes me appreciate the pixel size, that now has grown backward from being visible to tiny ones, and color limitation, from black and white only to 256 colors, more. As a new generation artist, those limitations inspire me to get around without rushing. It is a playground to learn to be patient, to be persistent, to know yourself, and about dreams.

Pinot's old school approach is his way to see the future and beyond. The book is wiro-bound with stiff card covers and, inside, it pretty much animates itself! Most of what Pinot makes moves, and even the finished artwork pieces were created through a process of creating many dynamic lines of code or pixel positions. The challenge with the book was finding a way to illustrate the dynamic. As a result, this is a book of many flip books and Post-It notes and step-by-step sequences.

Pinot's personal project in reanimating Childish Gambino's 2018 video for This Is America was made on Macintosh 128K + MacPaint - Animation too: Macintosh SE + MacroMind VideoWorks connected with LocalTalk.

One version of the video on Pinot's IG picked up 3.5m views. See that here. The completed film was played out by Fatboy Slim in March 2019 In the book, thanks to the flip pages and screenshots, Donald Glover dances again :)

The book is 25 x 20cm but even at that page height you just can't appreciate the extraordinary scale (small scale detail that is) of Pinot's Flatiron in Black and White (2018) and The Construction of the Empire State Building from 1929 to 1930 made on a Macintosh 128K with MacPaint 1.5 in 2019.

Published by IDEA 

Double-wiro bound book with printed Post-It inserts, flip-book sections and cardboard inlays
Texts by Gary Vaynerchuk Jérôme Jarre Arwen + Pinot
Designed by Karla Jarvinen

25 x 20cm
244 pages
Limited edition of 1000 copies

© IDEA