Iteration is Usually Recursive (Pt. 1)

This is the companion piece released with 'Iteration is Usually Recursive — Introduction: Finding answers in pre-computational art', the first in a series of essays, some long, some short, on generative art, theory and the practitioners of the medium.

This piece started a simple experimen recreating George Nees’ Schotter (1968)— a classic piece of generative art history — as vanilla js SVG graphics. From there, I specifically developed it with non-plotter printing in mind, and more specific still, Riso Printing (think a scanner with a digital screen-printer MacGyver’d on). The palettes are taken from hex-estimated Risograph colour gamuts, with three layers being multiplied together to replicate, to some degree, the blending of the semi-transparent Risographic inks. Within this study, there’s a few different things going on, the initial setup is rectangles which cascade down the canvas, inheriting more extreme rotation as they get closer to the bottom (a la Schotter). The second is a subdivision of the shapes with filled circled, outlined circles and squares — since in this study the base shapes are rectangles and not squares, distribution of the ‘dithering’ can be larger than a single ‘pixel’ size — when these multiple layers overlap, the shapes produce a halftone-moire effect, forms and structures appear from the noise as the underlying patterns intersect.

tx: Who?, Cosimo, Liam Egan, Andreas Rau, Louis

Licensing: CC-BY-NC-ND