Dancette

Lumen & Logic

Nested chevrons packed edge to edge into a triangular fan, after a painted hourglass of two point-to-point triangles on bare paper. Every chevron in the picture is a level set of `max(α, β)` in the fan’s own affine frame, which is why its two arms run parallel to the two sides of the triangle holding them, why its vertex sits on the centre line, and why its ends land on those sides rather than stopping in mid-air — and why, once the vertex would fall outside the base, the chevron simply has none and reads as two lone runs of slivers in the far corners. The radii fall in a geometric progression, so band width tracks distance from the point and the colour rhythm comes out at the same number of chevrons per cycle down at the point as out at the base. Each boundary is then a jointed polyline displaced radially by its own amount, measured in bands rather than in pixels, out of one coherent field over (position along the chevron, band index) — so neighbouring boundaries lean together, converge, touch and cross, and the picture is made of long tapers and wedges biting across several stripes at once instead of a frayed edge. The whole thing is drawn with one primitive: the fan from its point out to one boundary, cut by its own base, filled outermost first over the top of everything inside it. A stripe is the part of one fill the next fill does not cover, a taper is where the two converge, a spike is where they touch and a dropout is where the inner one has overtaken the outer — four marks at four amounts of one crossing, with no stripe, taper, spike or dropout anywhere in the program, no seam to close and no stroke in the package. Colour is one dominant ground and thin chords of ink, each chord an ink and the ink furthest from it in lightness, so the pairings come off the palette rather than off a table. The ladder stops where a band would come out thinner than a line and the residue is filled solid, so the point closes on a small dark knot. The host is a knob — an hourglass, one triangle, a diamond, a four-way pinwheel, or a fan whose point sits off the sheet so the chevrons cross it nearly parallel — and it is nothing but the list of fans. Every edge is straight: no outline, no gradient, no shadow, no transparency, no texture and no curve anywhere in the picture.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm