Continuing on from a thought in Sequent 18, this is the same concept, using a similar (but not quite identical) visual language, but the area of hybridity is kept constant between the three states.

Thoughts

As before, this is an artwork that works better in digital print than digital images. And, also better as a photograph of the digital print.

In Sequent 18 the visual language employed gray, overprinting, and interlaced. Here, in Sequent 20 the language is overprinting, interlaced, and gray. Its a subtle change to the order, a hint that there is some kind of continuum and these are just “states” within, and the use of a constant area for “hybridity” allows for a better compare-and-contrast between them.

When I created these I had hoped that they would be better than Sequent 18. That there would be more nuance: the constant area of hybridity would reveal its message. However, now created, and shown next to the former, the result is rather bland, the nuance opaque.

Process

Created in Illustrator. Would probably have been more efficient to have simply done this as generative code.

One of the things I wanted to do was to be able to print out a proof of exploration — the “tryptic” configuration — as well as individual ones. In the past I’ve been lazy and simply worked on one artboard for the tryptic, then created new ones for each instance, and copy-pasted-in-place the appropriate bits, then printed each artboard as applicable. This gets a very messy when updating things — as is always necessary — and forgetting to re-copy the bits. So, I finally set up nested artboards, the instance artboards positioned in the tryptic one, and can now print/export whichever I want without having to worry about ensuring copies are up to date (because there are no longer copies floating around). Trying to do nested artboards is not the easiest thing in the world. The UI isn’t “smooth”… too much friction… for something that is conceptually so simple (I want an artboard of this size position here over this other one)… whoever though that shift-option-drag was a good idea? Finally, once all artboards were created, positioned, repositioned, tweaked, and labelled, it works really well, even if it did take a a long time to get to this stage.

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