Rowel

Lumen & Logic

A wheel of flat marks on a coloured disc, turned rather than drawn. One curve is built for the whole picture and every mark in it is that curve rotated by an equal step, so nothing is scattered, jittered or chosen mark by mark and the disc carries exact N-fold symmetry; the seed's whole job is to shape the single stroke, through a phase and three harmonics that vanish in value and in slope at both of its ends. The stroke runs from a solid hub out to a stop short of the disc’s edge, and its angular position along the way is a sigmoid of a biased radius — so its lean is zero where it stands on the hub, zero where it ends, and greatest in between, which is what makes it a hook rather than a blade set at an angle, and what makes the hub's rim come out finely serrated by the roots standing on it rather than by any tooth being drawn. A bump supported on the outer stretch swings the stroke back against its own sweep and returns it, curling the tips into question marks without disturbing either end. Width is measured in angle rather than in pixels: a mark’s half-width is a fraction of the angular cell, so the ink’s share of every circle is a function of radius alone and is the same whether the wheel has twenty-four marks or three hundred and sixty — the count is a density control that cannot clog at the hub or gape at the rim, and because that fraction is capped below one, two neighbours can never meet at any radius. The mark itself is one band under four cuts, all taken in the band’s own coordinates so they bend with it: solid, hollowed to two rails, cut along its length into beads, or studded with a row of field-coloured pearls that swell at the belly and shrink to dots at the ends. Colour is dealt in sectors around the disc rather than mark by mark, so it can weaken the wheel’s symmetry but never scatter into speckle. The picture appears to contain two opposite families of spiral and contains one: the second is the shape of the gaps, and nothing draws it. Flat and opaque throughout — two inks, no outline, no gradient, no transparency, no shadow and no texture.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm