Crimp

Lumen & Logic

A white sheet strewn edge to edge with short flat strips of colour, each one bent two to four times and cut off square. There is one mark and one material: a walk of a few steps swept into a ribbon of a single width shared by the whole picture, so a hundred and forty unrelated marks read as one cut of paper. The walk is taken on a hidden lattice of directions — a handful of headings spaced evenly around the circle and rotated together by the seed — and on one ladder of lengths, which is why parallels and repeated runs turn up everywhere without a single mark sitting on a grid: direction and length are quantised, position is not. Every turn is a whole number of quanta, never zero and never a reversal, so nothing in the sheet is straight and nothing folds back on itself, and a mark is refused a step that would bring it within its own width of a part of itself it does not already touch. Five turn policies share that one generator: a free walk, a staircase whose turns alternate, a coil whose turns all agree, a closed circuit whose last two lengths are solved rather than drawn so the strip meets itself exactly and paints as a ring with the paper showing through, and a star that hangs one or two more arms off an ordinary walk’s own fold. The ribbon is mitred at the folds and cut flat where a mitre would spike, and a share of the ends are cut on the slant like scissor work. Marks are seeded by best-candidate sampling over the sheet inflated past its own edges, so density is even and the picture is a crop out of a field that continues; colour is dealt flat and then repaired, so no two marks that run within a strip-width of each other carry the same ink. Nothing is outlined, blended or made transparent — where two strips cross, one simply covers the other, and the order is shuffled rather than stacked.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm