THE DIRECTOR

THE DIRECTOR is the founder portrait on the Studio page. It stays a photograph until a hover, tap or key press. Then a single Archimedean spiral is engraved across it from just off the lower-left corner, and the face appears in the line’s changing width, wide where the photograph is light and thin where it is dark. The technique is Claude Mellan’s, from his 1649 Sudarium, and a WGSL shader draws it live in the browser. On the 20 × 27 cm plate, the line is 41.2 m long.

Press Play with sound and the line becomes a record groove. Its score, THROUGHLINE, plays one wavetable cycle for each pass of the line across the face, and the engraving follows the needle. The live exhibit adds two more scores, ENSEMBLE and CANON. Nano Banana Pro generated the pictures of the copper plate and the printed proof from the code’s own render. Neither object has been made.