Sett

Lumen & Logic

A thousand small ruled tiles on a square lattice that never moves. Every cell of the grid holds one tile and no cell is empty; the tile is always the same object — a square crossed by five hairlines into six bands of unequal width, each band a flat tone, with one heavier line down a leading edge and a blob at its foot. The bands are not a shading ramp and not equal sixths: a band's width follows its lightness, so a tile is one or two broad pale fields cut by several thin dark rules, which is what keeps a sheet of a thousand of them light instead of muddy. Six bands is the invariant — the tile changes size by half across the sheet and the count never moves, so the ruling pitch is a fraction of the tile rather than an absolute. Three smooth, very-low-order fields ride over the lattice and do all the work: the heading, which sweeps through ninety degrees with no defect anywhere; the size, which packs the tiles edge to edge in a broad plateau and opens paper between them at two opposite corners; and which of two colourways a tile is drawn in, a warm chromatic ladder whose saturation rises as it darkens and a neutral grey one that reads blue only by contrast. Size and colourway are coupled — big tiles run warm, small ones cool. Everything the picture appears to contain, the long sweeping courses, the swirl, the warm ridge, the pale corners, is those three fields showing through a grid that contributes nothing but registration.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm