Scantling

Lumen & Logic

A braid of long open splines and a shoal of complete circles are drawn as one flat arrangement inside a rectangle whose two opposite corners carry L-brackets, and every face of that arrangement is filled by its own scantling — the diameter of the largest disc that fits inside it, and nothing else. Solid where there is no room, a horizontal ruling where there is a little, a flat wash where there is a lot, and bare paper above a ceiling. That ceiling is the point: it is what keeps three-quarters of the sheet empty, in two great connected grounds either side of the diagonal corridor the braid runs down. The law is a gate and not a ramp — width decides which treatments a face may have, never how dark it is, so nothing here shades and no face is ever a blend of two things. Nothing overlaps and nothing is layered: circles cut faces exactly as the curves do, which is where the crescents and the long tapering lenses come from, and the black slivers are simply the faces too narrow to be anything else. The ruling is horizontal in every face and is never crossed; give it a second angle and this becomes a different algorithm. The curves are stroked full length over the top at the end, so the drawn line sits centred on the boundary between two fills rather than beside it, and the two brackets mark the corners the braid actually runs between.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm