Horst Bartnig is an artist who, already at the time of the former German Democratic Republic, was considered to work with computers. He did use this kind of machine but his art is mainly concrete art in series and variations. No doubt, he had to become aware of the computer as a means to help him do what he had been doing without computers.
His topics are largely determined by colors that he plays with in geometric forms. Often he works out long series of variations, up to complete sets of all the possibilities a given schema permits.
Since 1972 he had the opportunity to cooperate with a physicist at Zentralinstitut für Kernforschung (Center for Nuclear Research) in Rossendorf near Dresden. In 1979 he got access to a mainframe computer in Berlin Adlershof.