The work on this site is made by a program. Not a prompt and not a filter laid over a photograph — a set of instructions that starts with a blank sheet and places marks on it, one after another, until the sheet is full or the rule runs out.

Nothing about the finished image is stored anywhere in advance. The program is given one number and a handful of settings, and the picture is whatever happens when it runs. Change the number and the same instructions arrive somewhere else entirely — not a variation on the last one, a different place.

What follows is what the rule is, what is left to chance, and why a sheet bought here is made once and never made again.

The rule and what it leaves open

The division of labour is the whole of it. The rule decides what kind of thing can happen on the sheet; chance decides which of those things does. Neither half is interesting alone — a rule with nothing left open draws the same picture forever, and chance with no rule under it draws noise.

Nothing in the rule is measured in pixels. Every distance is a fraction of the sheet it is drawn on, and two things follow from that. The same piece can be drawn small enough to look through overnight and large enough to print, and it is the same picture both times rather than one blown up from the other — so the preview a piece is chosen from is genuinely that piece. And a sheet of a different shape is not that picture cropped to fit: the program solves the composition again for the proportions it is handed, and arrives somewhere else. That is why a work here is made at one size and sold at that one.

What this page does not do is name the dials. There are settings, they have ranges, and moving one moves the work — but a list of them describes one version of a program that is still being changed, and the claims worth putting on a page like this are the ones that stay true and that you can check from outside it. Those are the rest of this page: most of what the program makes is thrown away, the same number returns the same picture, and every piece that is issued is written down.

What gets thrown away

Most of what the program makes is not worth printing.

A batch is rendered overnight as small, cheap previews and then looked at one at a time. Most are discarded. A good many are close and still wrong — a composition that crowds into one corner, two colours that go muddy where they meet, a run that stops too early and leaves the sheet looking unfinished rather than quiet.

Only what survives that is rendered at full size, and only what survives a second look is given a number and a title.

This is the step easiest to leave out of a description like this one, and it is the step that takes the most time. The program makes images. Choosing between them is the work.

Seeds, and why they matter

The single number the program starts from is called a seed.

Everything downstream of it is determined. The same seed, given the same instructions, returns the same picture — today, next year, on another machine. Nothing is drawn from the clock or from the weather. That is not an implementation detail; it is what makes the rest of this page mean anything.

Two things follow from it, and both matter more than they sound like they should.

The first is that a piece can be lost and recovered. A crashed render, a failed disk, a sheet damaged in the post — the seed is in the register, and the file comes back identical rather than merely similar.

The second is the one that matters if you are buying. Seeds here are kept in two pools, and they do not mix. One pool feeds the open-edition prints the studio sells through Etsy, which are printed again every time somebody orders one. The other feeds the work sold on this site, one piece at a time. The pipeline refuses the wrong combination outright — it will not put a one-of-one caption on a seed from the repeating pool, or send a seed from the single-sale pool to the open edition — and every piece that is issued is written to a register that is only ever added to.

So when a sheet from this site says UNIQUE in its bottom margin, that is a statement about an object rather than a word chosen to sell it. There is no cheaper copy of it anywhere, because the seed that made it was never offered to the press that prints repeats.

From code to paper

The file a press receives is rendered at the size it will be printed, at 300 dots per inch, and never enlarged from something smaller. That is the difference between a sheet that holds up with your nose against it and one that looks right from across the room and falls apart up close.

Each sheet carries a line in its bottom margin: the title and the studio mark, and on a one-of-one, that it is one. Signed pieces leave that margin empty and get it in pencil instead — the old printmaking distinction between a reproduction and an original print, and collectors read it that way.

Most printing happens at a fine-art press near whoever is buying, on 250 gsm archival matte paper, and arrives as a local parcel. A sheet posted across a border costs its buyer more in import duty and delay than the printing is worth. Signed pieces are the exception: those are printed to a higher standard, finished by hand and posted by the studio.

Lineage

The direct ancestor of this kind of work is Jared Tarbell, whose sketches — Substrate, Sand Traveler, Happy Place — were published with their source code in the early 2000s and showed a generation of people what a short rule could do to a blank canvas.

Nothing here is a copy of any of it, but the family resemblance is not in doubt, and in a field this small pretending otherwise would be worse than useless.

Where the work is

Shop has the prints available now. Original works are not sold through it — those go by enquiry, which is also the right place to start for a commission or a licence.

The FAQ covers paper, sizes, framing, postage and returns.