Vernier

Lumen & Logic

A sheet of ribbons in three inks on black, swept into long shallow S-curves, where the whole subject of the picture is which of the three is fat and where. There is one mark and one material: a band of flat colour between two level sets of a single scalar field, and there is no outline, no shading, no gradient, no transparency and no second scale of detail anywhere. That field is the horizontal coordinate plus a handful of sines, and its amplitudes are rescaled so that one sum — of each amplitude times its own horizontal frequency — lands exactly on a number strictly below one. That single inequality puts a positive floor under the field’s derivative, which makes every level set a graph rather than a curve, and therefore makes crossing, merging, looping and ending impossible rather than merely unlikely: every ribbon in the picture runs unbroken from the top edge of the frame to the bottom, no two ever meet, and their left-to-right order is the same at the foot as at the head however far they have swept in between — at any setting, with no check anywhere in the program. The matching sum over the vertical frequencies appears nowhere in that argument, is unbounded, and is the entire source of the lean, so a picture with a hard ordering guarantee still sweeps past sixty degrees. Because the boundaries are solved rather than followed, a ribbon is a filled polygon and its edges are hard; because its width is fixed in the field’s units rather than in pixels, it fattens where the field flattens and thins where the field steepens, so a single ribbon swells and narrows down its own length without anything varying. The ribbons sit on a ladder whose step is modulated, and the modulation’s period is deliberately near three and not three while the inks cycle at exactly three. Because the two periods disagree by a fraction, the assignment of the wide step precesses through the inks across the sheet, so the picture organises itself into broad soft territories of one colour’s dominance that nothing draws an edge around and no parameter names — and setting the disagreement to zero does not switch that off but locks it, starving one ink to a thread over the whole sheet. The ground is only what no ribbon covers: where the ladder’s step is narrower than a ribbon’s maximum width there is no black at all, and where it opens past it the leftover is the black, so the picture’s tone is the ladder seen edge-on and no brightness is ever computed. Colour carries no information whatever — it is a counter over three inks, dealt in strict rotation and constant along a ribbon’s whole length — and everything the picture appears to say with hue it says with width.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm