Volute

Lumen & Logic

A sheet covered edge to edge in one field of evenly spaced grooves — rainbow fans, spiral eyes and short combs, in two tones and nothing else. Every line in the picture is the offset of one arc at a whole multiple of a single pitch, and the three motifs are three settings of that one arc rather than three kinds of mark: an arc of a few pitches’ radius offsets into a tight hooked fan, an arc of twenty into a comb that reads as straight, and an arc of zero radius into a set of concentric rings. An eye is the same construction plus one term — a whole number of pitches of radius added per turn of angle — which is the only difference between a target and a spiral anywhere in the package, and it is what lets a line be followed continuously from the open field into the centre. Because the marks are the offsets themselves, walked analytically rather than contoured off any grid, the spacing between neighbours is the same in a tight curl as in a lazy sweep, at any output size, and no two lines can cross or merge: two offsets of one arc are a pitch apart by definition. The sheet is divided by which arc is nearest, and a line is drawn only inside its own arc’s territory and stopped short of the boundary by a fixed clearance — so the ragged fronts where one bundle dies into the next are a consequence of the partition rather than anything drawn, and the channel of bare ground along them is one setting. How far a bundle reaches is not a setting either: a locus draws its next offset, and when none of it survives the partition it tries once more and is finished, so a fan has exactly as many lines as it has room for. The hand is two bounded displacements: a slow bow sampled in the plane, so neighbours bow together and stay parallel through it, and a fine quiver of each line’s own — both capped below the spacing, so the drawing looks made by a hand and still cannot tangle. The lattice of arcs overhangs the sheet by a cell on every side and the drawing is clipped to it, so the field is cut by the frame rather than ending at it.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm