Urban Contour

In late October 2023 the editors who produce Amazing Life, the quarterly for Lexus owners, wrote to ask him for the cover of issue 100, themed “Next Generation”. Beside a square cover, both sides settled on a live version: one algorithm, a different version for everyone who opens it, which they can save and keep.

In the concept presentation he delivered on 6 November the work was still called Slices of The Future City. As the issue’s cover story records it, his first thought was the Impressionist stroke: the future is not one person’s imagining but many people’s, and laying everyone’s imagined pictures over one another until no one could tell their own dream from a collective unconscious might come closer to what the future really is. The idea turned in his head for more than two weeks, and on 21 November he wrote it as that day’s daily sketch, 231121 Urban Contour.

In the interview he described the first step this way: “I made the block fade from brightness 1 to 0 as it floated up, like watercolour thinning out, then added many more blocks piling up, and suddenly I thought: what if I give them an angle? The blocks began to grow a pseudo-3D depth.” Once the outlines of a city appeared, he found he had no need to draw a car: looking at the picture, he could almost see future vehicles of every kind slipping between the buildings.

On a 1000 × 1200 canvas the program lays out strokes at four spacings, 20, 50, 100 and 200 pixels; the finest layer skips some cells at random, and where the noise runs low whole patches are left empty, about 2,400 strokes to a picture. Each stroke is a dashed line, half of them slanting thirty degrees to the left and half thirty degrees to the right, the shortest five to fifteen pixels long, the longest four hundred.

All the strokes float upward together, one or two pixels a frame. Over the first hundred frames their colour fades from full to transparent, and the paths they float along stay on the picture: a diagonal dash drags upward into a wall, and the gaps in the dash become a row of windows. Two thirty-degree slants and one vertical trail are exactly the three directions of an isometric drawing of a cube, and so lines on a flat surface gain façades.

At the moment it opens, the colour is drawn from one of three palettes: deep blue, lake blue and white; grey, beige and rust red; violet, indigo and yellow-orange. In the finest layer some strokes choose instead from a mix of nearly forty colours. Every stroke also has a one-in-a-hundred chance of turning plain red, and those are the scattered red points among the blocks. Finally the whole picture is laid over itself twice in multiply and twice in soft light, so the dark goes deeper and the lit windows brighter, after which the picture barely changes.

The colour, he said, came last: “In the end I decided to adjust the colour. The piece started as a large field of blue, stressing the rational mood of technology. One day I woke up and felt a little warmth would be good too, a sign that the future is still full of life.”