Bornite

Lumen & Logic

An extreme macro photograph of a tarnished mineral crust, computed rather than shot. One population of iridescent flakes — cracked plates, tufts of hair-fine filament and specular points — is scattered through a shallow depth volume, and every colour in the picture comes from thin-film interference: a film thickness field sets the optical path difference, the wavelength-dependent reflectance is integrated against the CIE colour matching functions and converted to sRGB, so the plates band through Newton's series — gold, orange, magenta, violet, blue, cyan and back — instead of sampling a ramp. A tilted plane of focus and an aperture then do the rest of the work: elements are bucketed into depth slices, each slice is convolved with its own circle of confusion and composited back to front with occlusion, so a narrow diagonal band of the frame resolves into razor-sharp seams and everything else melts into broad banded masses, while defocused speculars open into rim-bright aperture discs. Nothing is painted soft; softness is what the lens does to sharp material.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm