Casbah

Lumen & Logic

A hill town piled into one connected heap of flat-colour façades over a ground of hard-edged horizontal colour bands. A mound-shaped occupancy mask — a bulging waist, a stepped ragged skyline with one dominant peak, a foot that breaks up into stilts — is packed edge to edge by a greedy maximal-rectangle tiling, so every façade is cut from the same grid, no two neighbours can overlap or leave a gap, and the heavy constant-weight black contour web is the tiling itself rather than an outline drawn around anything. Each façade takes one flat opaque fill that no neighbour is allowed to repeat, and most take a grid of small white four-pane windows, a minority of them round-topped. Blocks whose top edge is exposed grow a roof plane over the façade behind them — a gable, a shed sheared sideways, an overhanging awning or a hip — ruled with black and white diagonal stripes at a pitch held constant across the sheet, so a large roof carries many bands and a small one carries three. The sky boundary of the same mask is read a second time to stand a register of monuments on the skyline — a dome on a drum with a finial, an arcaded lantern, a needle spire with a banded shaft, a steeple, a clock tower with a white face and two hands — and one wide arcade gate is reserved in the middle of the mass before packing, pierced by an odd number of round-arched openings that are repainted with the background bands so the ground shows straight through the town. Outside the silhouette a thin scaffold of near-vertical and near-horizontal rails crosses and overshoots itself, densest against the mass and thinning outward, drawn before the town so the town buries it, and dropping out of the foot of the heap as long legs. Every fill is opaque and flat: no perspective, no side faces, no shading, no gradient, no shadow and no texture, and the only depth cue in the picture is overlap.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm