Light / Paper2026
- Status
- In progress. A companion series to Light / Signal
- Medium
- Generative, screen-native, interactive. Real-time WebGL
- Colour
- Four process inks on a sheet. No palette anywhere in the code
- Token
- Each work is one hash. The print is fixed by it; the spills are not
- Features
- Gesture, press, fault and ink mix, read off the token itself
- Interaction
- A drop of water. It spreads, wets, dries to a tidemark, and stays
- Ageing
- Nothing heals. Dried stains accumulate alongside the sheet's wear
- Dependencies
- None. No libraries, no external assets
- Edition
- Not yet set
This series is unfinished. The text below is a working draft and will be replaced.
Light / Signal was about a display that could not carry the light it was handed. This one is about reproduction, an older kind of failure. A Light / Paper work exists only as four separations, and its colour is an accident of overlap.
The fork started with one worthless change: mirror the parent's palette ramps so the unlit majority of a frame lands on paper instead of on black. It fixed the value structure and nothing else, and why it failed is the whole case for this project. A mirrored display palette still quantises to sixteen indexed entries under a 4×4 ordered dither evaluated on the image's own pixel grid. That is a mosaic: same grid, same resolution, so it prints as pixels. Every print artefact worth having comes from the screen being independent of the image.
The image is drawn at about 820 columns, the screen at up to 2600. The two are unrelated on purpose, and that gap is where the halftone comes from.
| 1 — Emit | 2D canvas. Ink laid down as separations. The canvas's three channels are the three chromatic separations: R is cyan laydown, G is magenta, B is yellow. Compositing is lighter, so overlapping marks add ink, which is what two passes of a press do. |
|---|---|
| 2 — Press | GL. Slur, doubling, lost grip, ghost impression. |
| 3 — Tone | GL, at the plate's resolution. Density curve, mottle, grey component replacement into CMYK. Key is not drawn by anything: it is pulled out of the chromatic separations, as on a real four-colour job. |
| 4 — Screen | GL, at the device's resolution. Clustered-dot halftone on stock. |
Colour is four primaries, not a palette
Every colour beyond the three primaries is an overlap. A cyan dot on a magenta one transmits the product of the two and comes out blue, because the screen stage multiplies ink transmittances onto the sheet. No table anywhere says it should. A print has four inks and a sheet, with nowhere to author a ramp, so what a token varies is the press.
| Presses | offset · newsprint · gravure · letterpress · risograph · screenprint. Each fixes the ink transmittances, the stock, the screen ruling, the dot gain, the ink limit and the GCR. Newsprint and gravure sit further apart than any two of the parent's ramps. |
|---|---|
| Ink mixes | On top of the press, a token draws two mixes from the primaries and their secondaries. Thin ink shows the hue and dense ink goes neutral, which is what ink does, and it is why a mark here has a coloured fringe that nobody painted. |
| Gestures |
impression — a plate bitten and pressed in. Ink is squeezed out from under the plate and pools at
the bite line, so the solid is denser at its rim than in its centre. register — one set of forms, printed once per separation, each plate a few percent out of true. The fringe is not drawn; three plates are simply printed in the wrong places. bleed — capillary wicking. A machine-made sheet has a grain direction, so the wick is anisotropic and every tendril leans along one axis. rule — rules and bars inked by a roller that is not perfectly round. Every rule in a set bands in phase, because it is the same roller. stroke — a wide flat brush, loaded and dragged. Constant width, blunt ends, and the filament tracks are raked back out of the solid: they are bare paper. overprint — hard-edged flats, each in one primary. The deliberate opposite of the other five, and a demonstration that three inks and a sheet are sufficient. |
| Faults | slur · doubling · wander · clean. A transmission chain and a press fail in the same shapes, since both are a surface moving past a source at a speed that is slightly wrong. |
| Screen | Clustered-dot, on a Euclidean spot function. Zero at the integer lattice, so coverage grows outward from a cell centre and a highlight comes out as a field of small round dots. It tiles exactly and is smooth everywhere, so the dot rim can be antialiased at whatever scale it lands at. |
| Angles | Rotated per separation on the classical set (K 45°, C 15°, M 75°, Y 0°), so the four beat into a rosette instead of a plaid. A token rotates the whole set and mis-angles each by a degree or so, which is what makes a real job print a visible moiré. |
| Dot gain | A dot prints wider than the plate asks, because ink squeezes out under pressure. The excess is proportional to the dot's perimeter, so the term peaks at 50% coverage and vanishes at both ends. It is why a heavy-gain press plugs its midtones while its highlights and solids stay put. |
| Ruling | Expressed as cells across the long edge, not in lines per inch, so it is resolution-independent: the same rosette appears in a 400px contact-sheet cell and in a 3750px export. |
The print is made once. The first three stages run at boot and never again, and the frame loop redraws only the screen. So the press faults are baked into the token: they band down the sheet as the cylinder turns, and they have nothing to do with where anybody clicked.
What is left is a finished object, and the only thing you can do to it is wet it. Getting here meant cutting an impulse ring inherited from the parent, and cutting it made the series. A ring is a wave in a medium with a restoring force, which suits a display. Nothing in a sheet of paper oscillates, and the ring undid itself besides, healing the piece back to the image it started from. Damage to paper only accumulates. A sheet is a record of what has happened to it.
| Spread | The front runs outward fast and then asymptotes, because the further it goes the more rim there is to wet. It runs further along the fibre than across it, so it is lobed rather than round. |
|---|---|
| Wet | The ink in the patch is mobile. It gets carried outward, the paper goes darker, and the dots gain hard, since a wet sheet has no sizing left to hold them. |
| Dry | The front stalls and evaporates from its edge, dragging the dissolved pigment out to the perimeter and leaving it there. You get a washed-out interior and a hard rim exactly where the water stopped. It is still a ring, and it is a scar. |
| Chromatography | Water separates process inks by solubility, so a wet patch pulls the separations apart by different amounts and the tidemark fringes. The fringe comes from the inks being different substances rather than from shoving the plates around afterwards. |
| Tidemark colour | Sampled from inside the patch rather than authored. A rim crossing a yellow flat comes out olive, and the same rim crossing bare paper comes out the brown of dissolved size and lignin. |
| Nothing heals | Dried patches bake into a damage buffer, accumulate, saturate and persist alongside the wear. A spill still drying when the tab closes is committed. Only a reset clears them. |
| Sizing | The one press number the water reads. Newsprint drinks a spill and prints a broad soft stain. Gravure stock holds it in a tight puddle and prints a line. |
Numbered in hanging order rather than the order they were drawn.
Twelve tokens pulled live off the press as this page loaded, one per gesture where the draw allows. None belongs to an edition, since there is not one yet. A print run is entitled to quiet pulls, so some of these are close to bare stock with a single mark on them.
Reload for twelve more, or walk the space at length.
Drawn six times larger than they are shown and optically reduced, so the tone, the colour and the stock read as they do on the full sheet. A cell this size cannot resolve the rosette: the dots average into tone, the way a real print does across a room. Open one to stand closer.