Patchbay

Lumen & Logic

A sheet packed edge to edge with orthogonal multi-core cable on a deep violet ground. A grid is filled with non-crossing snakes grown by straight-biased self-avoiding walks — long runs, single right-angle turns, frequent hairpins that double a cable back beside itself with only a hairline of ground between — and every snake is drawn by stroking its own centreline repeatedly at decreasing widths, so the bundle of equal pastel lanes, its concentric filleted corners and its capsule ends all fall out of the stroker and are never built as shapes. The sheet is then cut into large rectangles, and each rectangle redraws the entire field under a clip with its own ground tone and its own rotation of the colour ramp: a cable therefore changes colour dead square across its width at a block edge, on the same line as the ground and as every other cable, while its geometry runs on unbroken — nothing in the picture is ever cut. Lane inks step a fixed distance apart along a hue-sorted ramp of pastels from a start index read off a slow two-harmonic hue field, so neighbouring cables agree and the hue drifts across the sheet. Cells the routing never claimed carry small low-contrast marks in the ground register — a dash, a pair, a stack, or a seven-segment digit built from the same dashes — and the field runs past its frame and is cut square by it. Every fill is opaque, every edge is a straight line, a quarter-circle fillet or a capsule end, and no cable ever crosses, branches or joins another.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm