The desk is first: name a seed, pick instruments from ninety-five, and this site’s own engine (system/generative-field.js) draws your plate in your browser. Below it, forty-two full-size plates and a contact sheet of the instruments behind them. Every caption carries the recipe: layers first, seed second.
procedural · seeded plates repeat exactly · live plates never do
The print desk.
Start here. Name a seed, pick up to three of the ninety-five instruments, and the engine draws your plate on this page. The same seed and instruments reproduce the same plate on any visit, so save the PNG or copy a link that redraws it. If you would rather see what the engine can do first, the exhibition is directly below.
Your plateunnamed · waiting for a seed
the desk draws on demand; nothing is stored anywhere
showpiece-veil · seed gallery-openingdisturb the plate: click to reseed where you point
Plate 02Obsidian burst, aurora rim
showpiece-burst · seed gallery-plate-02
Plate 03Dendrite over riso ground
riso-moire + dendrite · seed gallery-plate-03
Plate 04Pale caustics, interstitial
caustic-paper · seed gallery-plate-04
Plate 05Interference weave
showpiece-weave · seed gallery-plate-05
Plate 06Moire swirl, light leak
moire-swirl + aurora-leak · seed gallery-plate-06
Plate 07Lantern, hung in the void
showpiece-lantern · seed gallery-plate-07b
Plate 08Monument, pixel-sorted
showpiece-ruin · seed gallery-plate-08
Plate 09Coral accretion, thermal
dla-coral · seed gallery-plate-09
Plate 10Fiber canyon, wireframed
fiber-terrain · seed gallery-plate-10
Plate 11Neural field · the seed is the network
neural-field · seed gallery-neural-fielda CPPN: no pretrained weights, the seed derives the whole network
Plate 12Neural solid · a marched implicit surface
neural-sdf · seed gallery-neural-sdfa neural signed-distance surface, ray-marched in your browser
Plate 13Neural voxels · the solid, built in blocks
neural-voxel · seed gallery-neural-voxelthe same neural field, voxelized - exports to a voxel OBJ you can print
Plate 14Seeded typeface · the seed authors a face
typeface · seed gallery-typefacea live preview of the seed's slant, width, and weight; the builder exports it as a real .ttf/.woff2
Plate 15Truchet · tiles that draw a maze
truchet · seed gallery-truchettwo arcs per cell, one seed per grid: a classic that never repeats
Plate 16Voronoi · stained glass from scattered seeds
voronoi-stain · seed gallery-voronoinearest-site cells with dark leading: the seed scatters the glass
Plate 17Clifford · a strange attractor's cloud
clifford · seed gallery-cliffordfour seed-set constants, one orbit traced 140,000 times
Plate 18Phyllotaxis · the sunflower spiral
phyllotaxis · seed gallery-phyllotaxisthe golden angle, packed: the seed detunes the spiral and sweeps the palette
second movement · the registers: night highway, control room, cloth, machine anatomy, monument, quasicrystal, pen, sky
Plate 19Night drive
venetian-sun + laser-ridge + star-streak · seed gallery-night-drivethe sun is occluded arcs, the terrain is a waveform ridge field, the stars streak with real perspective
Plate 20Control room, 02:40
vu-bank + patch-catenary + phosphor-readout · seed gallery-nightshiftcassette futurism: needles at plausible deflections, cables sagging under real catenary math
Plate 21Ikat, drifting
ikat-drift + drape-tone · seed gallery-ikatthe blur along each chevron edge is the resist-dye bleed that names the technique
Plate 22Vega swell
vega-bulge + riley-swell · seed gallery-op-arttwo op-art grammars interfering: the bulge displaces the grid, the swell displaces the lines
Plate 23Spinal machine
vertebra-drive + ribbed-conduit · seed gallery-spinalanatomy abstracted to machine parts, form carried by crosshatch spacing alone
Plate 24The tower in ash
strata-monolith + ashfall-horizon + mourning-veils · seed gallery-towerstructure carried by tonal masses, not outline; the veils are gauze curtains of falling light
Plate 25Kite and dart
kite-and-dart + ammann-ghost · seed gallery-penrosegrown by real deflation with matching rules; the pattern never repeats, anywhere, ever
Plate 26Terrace, hatched
terrace-hatch · seed gallery-terracepen honesty: one stroke colour, tone only from hatch spacing and direction · plottable as drawn
Plate 27Flow comb
flow-comb · seed gallery-flow-comba seeded vector field, combed: each stroke is a short streamline through it
Plate 28Engraved sky
engraved-sky · seed gallery-engraved-skyan atlas of a sky that exists only in this seed · the anomaly is the authored gesture
Plate 29Occultation
occultation-strip + analemma-trace · seed gallery-occultationtwo calendars crossing: the phase strip counts the eclipse, the analemma counts the year
third movement · developed plates: the instruments draw, then a treatment from the same rack the desk uses develops the result
Plate 30Monolith, poured on glass
strata-monolith · developed halation then wetPlate · seed ash-tower-collodionone instrument, two chemical steps: the seam blooms, then the pour takes it back
Plate 31Apsides over an ice limb
planet-limb + apsis-ledger · developed bokeh then aberrate · seed orrery-uncorrectedthe chart and the body it charts, both through the same bad lens
Plate 32Colonnade, reversed in the developer
ossuary-colonnade + mourning-veils · developed sabattier · seed mackie-navesecond exposure, half-developed: the arches come back inside out
Plate 33Sun over the ash line
ashfall-horizon + pale-aperture · developed bleachBypass then starburst · seed aperture-ashline-77steepen it until the sun clips, then let the iris answer
Plate 34Arch, lit from behind
caustic-veils + ossuary-arch · developed halation · seed vault-of-cold-lightthe light is behind the structure: halation only touches what clipped
Plate 35Star chart, out of focus
engraved-sky + aurora-leak · developed bokeh then halation · seed nova-defocus-12magnitude becomes aperture: the scale survives the blur
Plate 42Floor grid, read one row at a time
horizon-tear + star-streak · developed rollingShutter · seed plate-tear-shutterthe grid tears twice: once in the drawing, once in the sensor that read it
Plate 37Sun off a worn tape
venetian-sun + laser-ridge · developed vhsTracking · seed plate-tape-sunluma stays sharp, chroma runs right · the strip at the foot is the heads handing over
Plate 38Terminal, tracking lost
phosphor-readout + toggle-rail · developed vhsTracking · seed plate-terminal-tapethe console was drawn, then recorded · one row still holds its inverse video
Plate 39Two reels, bad scan
riso-moire + tape-transport · developed rollingShutter · seed plate-transport-risoa print ground under a machine, both read by the same crooked scan
Plate 40Ridge scan, one ink
ridge-scan · developed duotone · seed plate-ridge-inkpen honesty, then press honesty: two plates, one warm ink, nothing to hide in
Plate 41Terrace, screened
terrace-hatch · developed halftone · seed plate-terrace-screena plotter drawing put back through a print screen · the contours survive the dots
Plate 36Planet limb, closing
planet-limb · seed gallery-plate-07
The sound desk.
The same seed that draws a plate can play a piece. Name a seed and the browser synthesizes a short phrase from it: the key, the scale, the melody, the timbre, and the tempo are all derived from the seed with pure math, no samples and no model. The same seed sounds the same on every visit; press play, or save it as a WAV.
seed to sound, the audio sibling of seed to plate: one DNA behind the field, the solid, the face, and now the phrase.
The editions desk.
Every plate above is an open edition. Its provenance is its named seed: the same seed and instruments reproduce the same plate, in your browser, on any visit. Take what you want today: the PNG beside any plate, the plotter-ready SVG, print files from the Studio, or the spatial edition running live. Computer art magazines were selling reproductions beside the printed work in 1976; this desk keeps the offer beside the work and removes the coupon.
reading the edition ledger…
The instruments.
A fixture is a frozen frame: a layer stack, a seed string, and nothing else. These twelve tiles are the contact sheet behind the plates above; keep a seed and its frame is stable down to the pixel, change it and the whole composition moves.