Rosette

Lumen & Logic

A portrait dissolved into a printed halftone rosette. The picture is a print rather than a drawing: one continuous plate — a shaded relief of one to four overlapping heads, baked from the depth maps of public-domain sculpture scans and ramped into the active palette — is separated into four inks, and each ink is screened at its own angle, the classical 15°/45°/75° process set that beats into the tightest rosette. Three of the inks are subtractive and can only darken; the fourth is opaque and printed last, which is why bright dots can sit over a dark passage in the same picture as dark dots over a pale one. The whole printed sheet is then bent and sliced: a field of Gaussian whorls rotates and slightly compresses it, two octaves of smooth noise smear it, and a stack of horizontal bands cuts it into slabs that slip sideways, hold one row and smear it, or drop toward the shadow ink. Because the screen is evaluated at the bent position rather than at the pixel, the lattice itself curves through the whorls, and where the bend compresses it the separations beat against one another into closed ring systems that nothing in the renderer draws — the misregistered inks fringing pale edges in palette colours for the same reason. The plate is baked once into a fixed 1200-unit raster and every length is a fraction of the frame, so a thumbnail and a full-size export are the same picture, dot for dot.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm