Enfilade

Lumen & Logic

One polygon, scaled about one point, over and over. A convex cross-section is placed on the sheet and repeated toward an off-centre vanishing point at a constant ratio, so every ring in the picture is the outer one at a smaller size in the same orientation, and the walls between consecutive rings are the only regions the renderer knows about. Those walls are not stroked but filled, which is what makes the ruling kink rather than mitre at every corner of the cross-section and carry a different width into each wall it enters, in exact proportion to that wall's distance from the vanishing point. Each wall is cut laterally into cells by rays through the vanishing point, and every cell draws exactly one quadrilateral, spanning from one fractional depth to another — so a stripe is that quad at half a band, a solid block is the same quad at a whole band, a blank is the same quad at zero, and the three marks the eye reads as three different things are one operator at three values of one number. Which value a cell takes comes from a coherent field sampled in the corridor's own along-and-into coordinates rather than on the page, so blocks step inward and shrink as they recede and can never fall out of register with the ruling that made them; a smaller share of cells take a phase offset instead and the ruling steps sideways. Away from the field the duty is one global constant, which is why the rulings run unbroken around every ring and read as ruled rather than drawn. The stack terminates where a band would come out finer than a line and whatever is left is filled solid, so the throat closes on a small dark knot exactly as it does on paper, and outside the mouth of the cross-section the ground is simply bare. Two inks, chosen off the palette by luminance distance from the ground; straight lines throughout; no rotation between rings, no outline, no gradient, no shadow, no transparency and no curve anywhere in the picture.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm