Traversal #17

Traversal is the marriage of two simple geometric ideas: a set of somewhat unruly, intersecting diagonal shapes, and a minimally reduced corner perspective that gives them depth.

The depicted bodies are entirely feasible as a 3D scene, and yet this composition is all about illusion. The hatch fill creates a perception of light. The dithering on the faces produces a sense of material texture. The squiggly lines imitate freehand drawing. The spatial perspective itself is achieved through a purely two-dimensional algorithm of polygon intersections and line hiding.

The original medium of my compositions is the pen plotter, and Traversal is no exception. It is entirely vector-based, and can be plotted directly. I use Paper.js to render it on-screen and as SVG.

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To generate and download a plottable SVG file, press S. Please be patient; this process can take a while. The SVG can be plotted on an A5 paper. It contains two layers visible in Inkscape, so you can plot the light grey sketch lines with a different pen, or omit them altogether.