Season States Summer 13

A line moves forward until it meets another line, then stops. New lines branch off the old ones at right angles. That's the whole rule. Over thousands of steps it divides the surface into rooms, and then into smaller rooms inside those, until the paper is a field of nested rectangles.

Behind each line, grains of colour drift out sideways and fade, stopping wherever the next line begins. The lines give the picture its structure and the colour fills the spaces between them, much as paper takes on water. The network runs on the diagonal, so it reads less like a map and more like woven cloth. The edges are left ragged on purpose, like torn handmade paper: the pattern doesn't end at the border, it just runs out of room.

Each work is one run of a program after Jared Tarbell's Substrate (2003), made in Processing. It's rendered at the full size it prints, so the structure divides more finely on the print than any screen can show. The image is never enlarged from a smaller file. The title and number are printed small in the white margin below the image.