Litany

Lumen & Logic

A word written down a troweled gesso board over and over, in which every line is a copy of the line above it rather than a copy of the original — so the error is inherited and compounds, and the writing decays the way a photocopy of a photocopy decays. The letterforms are a monoline geometric sans the renderer owns as polylines rather than as type, which is what lets a generation operator work on them: each pass loses resolution, so curvature flattens and short features like the dot of an i and the crossbar of a t thin and then die permanently; adds a tremor whose amplitude grows and whose wavelength coarsens, so a careful fine shake becomes two or three big swings per stroke; gives every letter its own inherited rotation, ride and size creep until neighbours collide and fuse; bends the baseline; and amputates limbs by cutting strokes short or breaking them in two. The tool degrades on its own axis: the first line is a flat monoline with round terminals and reads printed, the last is a loaded brush whose width swings threefold inside one stroke, pools where it turns, and breaks into dry bristle lines with board showing between them — never a grey, because every value in the ink is a question of where the tool did and did not touch. The decay is aimed rather than open-ended: each letter is pulled toward its counterpart in a second word on its own staggered schedule, so the middle of the column is a legible hybrid and the bottom of it is a different word written by the same failed hand, and because letters keep their own drifting positions instead of being re-set per line, a shorter target makes the writing shrink from the left and the surviving ink sits right of where the block began. Two colours and no hue: near-black ink on an off-white board of soft troweled plates.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm