Murmuration

Lumen & Logic

A few thousand small brush ticks coiling round an empty black eye, in which the coil is never drawn. One logarithmic spiral is used purely as a coordinate system: because it is the curve that meets every radius at a constant angle, the flow direction anywhere in the frame is closed-form, and because taking the logarithm of the radius turns it into a straight line, the whole arm becomes a straight strip in log-polar space, where a uniform brick-coursed lattice can be laid out with no integration, no noise and no numerical work of any kind. Each lattice site is kept or dropped by a probability that falls off toward the strip edges, so both flanks of the coil dissolve into scattered individuals and neither boundary is ever a line; the arm simply stops at its inner terminus and the void it leaves is the subject of the picture. Every surviving site takes one flat opaque tick turned to the local flow, bowed slightly toward the centre, and scaled by its own radius — so the mark, the course pitch and the band width are all one self-similar object and the coil reads as a single accelerating gesture rather than as a rope. The tick is one of five profiles by seed — a symmetric spindle, a blunt-headed needle, a square-cut chisel, a round-headed comma or an asymmetric blade — and each carries lengthwise dry-brush striations computed from its own width profile, so they stop short of the points exactly where the mark runs too thin to hold them, with no clipping anywhere in the package. Colour is the one axis with no structure at all: each tick draws a hard-random ink from a pool of bone, sky, steel, brick, madder, orange, moss, fern, amber and teal, over-weighted toward bone, with no zone, no run and no drift — every bit of the picture's order lives in where the marks are. Sparks fly clear of the mass, longer than their neighbours and alone on the black; one to four arms wind out of the same eye; and the ground is flat near-black under a faint vertical board grain. No line, no gradient, no glow, no transparency, no outline, no shadow and no light model: the marks never touch, and the spiral exists only as the reason they are where they are.

Medium: Generative algorithm, archival pigment print
Dimensions: 90 × 90 cm