Peter Schweri

Peter Schweri
Peter Schweri in the entrance to his apartment at Villa Egli, Zürich / 2014
Born	(1939-06-20)20 June 1939 Dietikon, Switzerland
Died	25 November 2016(2016-11-25) (aged 77) Zurich, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Occupation	Artist, painter, illustrator, photographer
Known for	"Zurich constructivism", "ArtCode86»

Peter Schweri (* 20 June 1939 in Dietikon – 25 November 2016 in Zurich) was a Swiss artist, painter, illustrator, objectartist, photographer and from 2008 on a music composer. He is a representative of the "Zurich constructivism".

Peter Schweri began his professional career as an apprentice draftsman in structural engineering from 1956 to 1959 at the Zurich College of Applied Sciences "Gewerbeschule Zürich". From 1959 to 1960, he also studied at the "Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich" where Hansjörg Mattmüller was his professor, mentor and, later, friend. From 1960 to 1961, Schweri studied graphic arts with Josef Müller-Brockmann. Due to Schweri's drawing and artistic talent, Paul Gredinger, one of the co-owners of the advertising agency GGK (Gerstner u. Kutter) hired him in 1962 to produce artwork to build GGK's cultural image. In the 1960s Schweri was extensively occupied with photography and film. He produced films for various clients in studios in Milan, Zurich and Paris. During this time, he also worked as an interior designer, produced an art film, (a forerunner of today's videoclips) for a disco in Milan and created a light show (a slide show with film footage), which was shown simultaneously on three screens in the nightclub Black Out in Zürich-Kloten. From 1968 to 1976, Peter Schweri lived and worked in the village of Carona (in the Ticino region of Switzerland) together with other artists who lived and worked there at the time. These artists included: Meret Oppenheim, David Weiss, Markus Raetz, Christoph Wenger, Anton Bruhin among others. At that time, he was intensively devoted to drawing. Many of these drawings, using a variety of techniques, come from the time he spent in Carona and are in his estate. From 1974 to 1976 he organized and led the biological food store "Mr Natural" in Zurich. Mr. Natural was one of the first shops selling macrobiotic and biological foods in Switzerland and was well known far beyond the Swiss borders as a forerunner of today's organic food shops.

Beginning in 1975 he traveled to Greece, Egypt and the Sudan. Later, from 1977 to 1983, he traveled extensively to Greece, France and Egypt. In Greece he stayed for one year for wind-surfing, living out of a Mercedes D190 van, which he personally customized and continued to use for travel from 1984 to 1989.

Schweri was a profound thinker and an insightful researcher. In 1986, his knowledge about the existence of the "Universal Skeleton of Art" inspired him to develop the "ArtCode86". To create art compositions with the use of mathematical constraints: that was, what attracted and fascinated Schweri. The director of the ETH Zurich Graphic Collection, Paul Tanner, organized in the summer of 1994 a group exhibition «Kicking boxes billiard» at the ETH Zurich. This show gave Schweri the opportunity to become acquainted with the computer scientist Jürg Gutknecht prior to the exhibition. As a result of this contact, Schweri was invited to have an office at the ETH Zurich computer center, which he had from 1994 to 2001, the beginning of his blindness. Together with Jürg Gutknecht, he developed the system "Sakkara" for drafting "visual scores" for art compositions and both computer and internet-based presentations. The creation of the first dynamic constructive artwork was now possible and Schweri created a unique concept of art that he named "Dynamic Art", the interactive totem. After three years of intensive studies of the functioning of the internet he was recognized in 1997 as an internet expert at the Institute for Computer Systems at the ETH in Zürich. In the same year he created his first own internet art site. From 1997 until 2001 he further developed his "Dynamic Art" on the internet. Various evolutions allowed artistic shapes to fundamentally change every second and whose duration can last from a few seconds to several billion years, depending on the constellation of the totem.