Ectype

Lumen & Logic

An uploaded photograph, abstracted until only its structure is left. The source is reduced exactly once — to a small colour raster, its luminance, and the gradient of that luminance — and every mark in the picture is then either a point drawn from a density made out of that reduction, or a curve integrated through a direction made out of it. The density mixes edge magnitude with tone, because tone alone spends every mark on a dark background and edges alone spend none on a pale subject; points are drawn from it by inverse-CDF sampling and then pushed toward a weighted centroidal tessellation by Lloyd relaxation, which is exposed as a knob precisely because the useful answer is *not converged* — every iteration trades a little of the photograph for a little more evenness. Facets, Cells and Stipple are that one point set read three ways: its Delaunay triangulation, that triangulation’s Voronoi dual, and the points themselves as discs sized by local density. Flow and Grating are one integrator on two direction fields — the image’s own isophote direction, rotated a quarter turn off the gradient so strokes run *around* forms rather than cutting across them and handing over to a noise field wherever the gradient is only sensor noise; or a constant angle, where two families a few degrees apart beat into a moiré that is nowhere computed. Colour is a rule rather than a copy: the sampled hue verbatim, or snapped to the active palette in a space that weights lightness double because form in a photograph *is* lightness, or discarded entirely for a two-ink ramp. The whole construction runs on a fixed 640-pixel working raster in normalised coordinates, so a thumbnail and a full-size export are the same picture mark for mark, and the source image is never blitted onto the canvas.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 60 cm