Zain Dana Harper

Field, ink and light

Every colour on these plates is a thickness of soap film or a wavelength of light.

Nine spheres in a grid on warm grey, each coated in an oil-film iridescence of pink, green and gold, crossed by a thin dark horizon line, printed with a fine halftone on its shadow side.

Seven more plates

  • Six tall pills of different lengths, each walking from blue through pink, gold and green, casting soft shadows.

    Capsules

    Soap film a few hundred nanometres thick, read along each pill.

  • Five discs with wedges cut toward the centre; the cuts line up into a pentagon that is not drawn, marked only by a faint dashed hairline.

    Wedges

    Nothing draws the pentagon. The dashes show where you saw it.

  • Sixteen soft blobs on a grid, neighbours fused by necks, coloured from violet at the top to green at the bottom.

    Blobs

    Two balls join when closer than 2.83 radii.

  • Rows of short pills offset in a wave, each a short spectral gradient.
  • A sheet split again and again at golden and half ratios, each cell a gradient between two spectral colours.
  • Twenty-five small iridescent spheres on near black, each crossed by its own reflected horizon.
  • Two-source interference read through 26 vertical columns: a dark X of blue and orange steps on near black, with a slight red and blue split.

    Steps

    A wave read through a coarse sensor: smooth down, stepped across.

One valley, two mediums

Sixteen colours, chosen by the painting. A dark stroke thinner than a cell keeps its cell.

A painted dusk valley: violet sky with lit clouds, a banded orange sandstone mesa, a sage plain dotted with dark junipers, a pale river, dark reeds in front.
The same valley in pixel art: flat clusters, a stepped sky, the mesa in three oranges with a dark outline on its shadow side, reeds kept as dark pixels.

One colour for what is lit

  • A street in grey marker and black line on warm white; marker strokes run toward the vanishing point; lit windows in blue.
  • The same street in two inks: deep navy blocks, paper sky, hatched pavement, lit windows and the lamp in amber.

Which way does it turn?

Both. With no depth in the lines, a left turn and a right turn are the same picture. Late in each loop the near edges brighten and the question settles.

One sea, four hours

The same waves in every band. Only the sun moves: 47.6 degrees north, the longest day.

  1. 06:00
  2. 12:30
  3. 18:18
  4. 19:42