Brigandine

Lumen & Logic

A frontal colossus assembled from a couple of hundred flat plates of painted paper on bare cream, in the manner of a brigandine — armour of small plates riveted between cloth, one moving figure at a distance and an assembly of separately cut pieces up close. The composition is an armature: a tree of part boxes — a crest, a head, a shoulder yoke, a stack of chest registers, a pelvis, and per side a shoulder pad, an arm chain ending in a fist and a leg chain ending in a foot — laid out in one normalised figure frame, generated once for one side and reflected, with centre parts carved as a half and reflected onto themselves. The reflection copies polygons and nothing else: every plate is dealt its own colour and each side is dealt separately, so the picture is exactly mirror-symmetric in its geometry and not at all in its paint. There is one cutting operator — a convex polygon split by a straight chord — applied recursively inside each box until it holds its share of the plate budget or nothing may be cut again, so every plate is convex, the plates of a part tile it exactly, and every contour in the picture is a straight segment or a circle. A plate is a load rather than a fill: one flat colour, a weak lightness ramp in a direction of its own, and a fine isotropic mottle, with no shading model anywhere — the bevelled reading comes from the cut, never from a light. There is no outline and no grout: plates butt, and a cut edge is dealt one of three roles, so about one join in eight carries a narrow shim of ink or slips to show the paper through. Every plate large enough may carry hardware placed in its own frame against its own inscribed box — stripe runs, nested chevrons, rung ladders, concentric roundels, rivets, rimmed slots, tooth combs, windows and corner notches — drawn only if it fits, so nothing is ever clipped by its host. A foot is the whole operator recursed exactly once: a small hull with its own boxes, its own finer cut and its own vehicle hardware, so the machine is assembled out of machines. Nothing in the package knows what a face is: a small box at the top that happens to take a mirrored pair of items over a grille simply reads as a head, and a seed is free to produce a figure with nothing legible on it.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm