Hocket

Lumen & Logic

Nothing here is drawn as a whole shape. Every plate in the picture is built outward from a chosen span of an existing plate's edge — the two share that segment exactly — so an assembly grows by hand-off the way a hocket passes one melody between two voices, and the heavy constant-weight keyline web is a consequence of the growth rather than an outline drawn around anything: a black line runs on from one plate into the next because there is only one line there. A chain walks a drifting spine, kinking and doubling back and throwing off short side-chains, and it is a figure only because it ended up tall, connected and vertical on an empty ground — no silhouette is decided in advance and none can be, since the outline is whatever the chain grew into. The same primitive, grown three different distances, gives the huge slabs that run off the frame edges, the figures themselves, and the fittings hung on them: a bar with a row of teeth, a run of plates each wider than the last with cross-bars over it, a fan of hairlines running past an edge, a sawtooth hem, an inset window. No plate is ever painted: its fill is a clipped window onto one of half a dozen bolts of stock — coarse pixel mosaic, ruled graph, fine static speckle, marbled curl, scattered confetti, flat and one soft ramp — whose lattices are pinned to absolute sheet coordinates rather than to the plate, so a stock reads as one continuous printed sheet running under every shape cut from it, however far apart they are. Under everything lies a pale ground ruled with hundreds of short horizontal dashes, and over everything strict painter’s order: every plate is opaque, nothing is blurred, shaded, lit or blended, and there is not one curve in the picture.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm