Light / Signal2026
- Edition
- Fifty works, curated from an unbounded output space
- Medium
- Generative, screen-native, interactive. Real-time WebGL
- Token
- Each work is one hash. The hash fixes the output completely
- Features
- Gesture, transmission and palette, read off the token itself
- Interaction
- A click is a blow. Energy enters at the point of contact
- Ageing
- Each work remembers being handled, and its palette drifts
- Dependencies
- None. No libraries, no external assets
- Output
- Stills export at print resolution, in the state the piece is in
Every work starts as one encounter with light, drawn clean and warm on black: light stopped, light passed through something, light meeting itself, light gathered slowly on a sensor. Then it spends its short life being wrecked.
The wrecking carries the argument. The mark accrues as though held open under long exposure. It travels as an electrical signal, where misbehaviour is the material. It lands on a cheap consumer display that holds a few dozen colours. One object in three states, kept apart rather than blended: light rendered, light misbehaving, light reduced by a machine too small for it.
None of the damage is painted on. It is what the chain does to a drawing, and most of the labour went into making the drawing underneath strong enough to survive the trip.
Nothing moves until you hit it. A click puts energy in where your cursor is and it travels outward as a wavefront, so the tearing is anchored there. The system rings, then takes several seconds to settle. The phase advances only while the work is energised, and it never runs backward. Whatever state you leave it in is the state it keeps.
Hit it hard enough and the apparatus surfaces. Every palette carries a light ramp and a complement, and the complement is the colour of the machinery rather than of the image, unreachable while the piece is at rest. Drive a piece and the feedback echo takes on that cast. Touching the light exposes what carries it.
Handling ages the phosphor. The palette drifts cooler and flatter, bounded so that a work can never be worn out of its own family, and the drift is stored, so it survives you closing the window. I like the worn ones better.
Six gestures, none of them a shape. Each is a mechanism that makes light visible. Some block it, some emit it.
| Gestures |
eclipse — light stopped. Opaque bodies in a luminous field; you see the edge. strata — light passed through. Stacked planes each dim what lies behind; you see the medium. scatter — light revealed by dust. Shafts from a source usually outside the frame; you see the beam. interference — light meeting itself. Concentric wavefronts from two or three sources; you see the pattern. orbit — light accumulated. Elliptical paths shearing against one another; you see where it has passed often. memory — light persisting. A single line and the record of where it has been; you see time. |
|---|---|
| Transmissions | Four ways for the signal to fail, weighted unevenly. drift — per-scanline displacement under slow modulators. sync-loss — whole rows losing hold and jumping. weave — alternate lines pulled against each other. clean — the rarity, a signal the chain barely marks. |
| Palettes | Eight families, weighted unevenly: phosphor, mercury, amber, ultraviolet, cyanotype, ash, oxide, carbon. Each is a sixteen-step ramp from near-black to hot white plus a four-step complement reserved for the apparatus. Held whole, never mixed within a work. They are spaced by measured perceptual distance. An earlier set was spaced by eye, and four of its eight ended up inside forty-five degrees of orange with no cyan at all. |
| Frame | A virtual camera crops into each gesture, so the frame cuts through the form instead of politely containing it. |
| Display | Ordered dither onto a fixed sixteen-step ramp, evaluated on the image's own pixel grid. |
One hash sets everything above, so the same token renders the same work on any machine, at thumbnail or at print size, this year or later. The captions under every contact sheet here are read back out of the token.
Numbered in hanging order rather than the order they were drawn.
The edition is fifty. The output space has no size at all. Below are twelve tokens drawn from it live as this page loaded, none of them in the edition and none ever going to be. A curated series is only as credible as the space it was cut from, so the space is public.
Reload for twelve more, or walk the space at length.
Thumbnails render on a smaller logical grid, so composition, palette and dither are faithful while the pixel count is lower. Open any one to strike it.