Light / Signal2026

Three things stand behind this work. There is a luminous mark drawn cleanly, accruing as though gathered by a long exposure. There is an electrical signal in which misbehaviour is the material rather than an error. And there is the ordered dithering and constrained palette of a consumer display, quantising whatever it receives into a few dozen colours.

I don't think of these as three styles to be mixed. I think of them as one object in three states: light rendered cleanly, light misbehaving as a signal, and light quantised by a machine too limited to hold it.

You cannot see light travelling. A beam crossing a vacuum is invisible; what we call seeing light is always seeing an interaction — light stopped, or passed through something, or meeting itself, or gathered over time by a sensor. So every piece begins with one of those encounters. Then I spend the rest of the chain damaging it.

Each work was built as a literal chain of three stages. I draw a gesture first — clean, luminous, warm, on black. I then transmit it, and each work is given one way for that transmission to fail: drifting per scanline under slow modulators, losing hold of whole rows at once, weaving alternate lines against each other — or, rarely, barely failing at all. Its colour channels are delayed against one another, and it is fed back into itself until it rings. Finally I display it, forcing it through an ordered dither onto a fixed sixteen-step ramp. I add nothing to make the image look degraded. The degradation is what the chain does to it, and most of my time was spent making sure the drawing beneath was strong enough to survive.

At rest, the piece is genuinely still. It does not loop quietly or animate below the threshold of notice — the computation has stopped. Time in these works doesn't pass on its own. It passes only when you strike them.

A click is not a switch. It's a blow. Energy enters where you touched and travels outward as a wavefront, so the tearing is anchored at the point of contact and nowhere else. The system rings, and over several seconds it settles. But the underlying phase advances only while the piece is energised, and it never rewinds. The still you leave behind is not the still you found.

Two things surface under the blow. The first is the apparatus. Every palette carries a light ramp and a complementary ramp, and the complement is unreachable at rest — it is the colour of the machinery, not of the image. Only when a piece is driven hard does the feedback echo take on that complementary cast. I wanted it to be impossible to touch the light without revealing what carries it.

The second is wear. Handling ages the phosphor rather than the light: the palette drifts cooler and less saturated along a saturating curve, bounded so a piece can never be worn past its own family. This is stored, so it survives you closing the window. A work you have struck a hundred times is visibly older than one still in its wrapper. Not damaged — handled. I find I prefer them worn.

I made far more of these than I kept. The series runs to fifty, chosen from a much larger generated pool, and sized to be looked at one work at a time.

Six gestures. Each is a different mechanism by which light becomes visible — not a different shape, but a different encounter. Some of these block light and some emit it. That isn't an inconsistency; it is the range of the question.

The series is fifty works sifted out of a far larger pool. Below is that pool, unsifted: twelve tokens drawn straight from the generator. Reload for twelve more, or explore the space at length.