Hey folks, this is @greweb.

After months of iterations, Arthur Simony and I are thrilled to release our new collaboration.

Next Tuesday, we will simultaneously have this collaboration available on fx(hash) and physically in a Paris gallery (achetezdelart.com).

In Plottable Spirals, we are generating random spirals of words. Arthur Simony's handwritten letters have been used and put together into code to reform curves of words. This revisits Arthur's famous artwork with the extended help of generative art and pen plotting. The chosen words are not exactly random: we selected words of positive values, and 1, 2 or 3 of them are randomly associated to form a theme. As any of @greweb's past "Plottable" work, the digital can indeed be physically unlocked with the help of a plotter.

We have curated many premium physical plots, signed and exhibited in the gallery and we welcome you if you are in Paris: the opening is on Tuesday 26th at 6PM. (Achetez de l'Art : 24 Rue de Lappe, 75011 Paris) and will ends on Sunday 1st October.

Complementary to these curated physical editions, the fx(hash) will allow everyone to collect a digital version of the Spirals generator as a NFT, those that are truly "generative" and uncurated (selected by randomness!). On top of the digital first NFT, you will also be able to materialize them into a physical plot using the Redeemable feature. Collecting the fx(hash) version on TIER 1 (that happens the first day only) will allow you to collect plots signed by both artists (signed on the back). Tier 2 will be unsigned (but still is physically collectible).

Plottable Spirals: the crossroads between handwriting and generative art

Arthur Simony's spiral work, when entirely handwritten, creates mesmerizing effects thanks to the very organic nature of handwriting. His writing is beautiful and his technique is amazingly regular, yet each word still has its own slight difference that creates local patterns overall making the piece truly unique.

On the other hand, Plottable Spirals only uses exactly the same word shapes, that repeat again and again, identically. This creates another kind of effect, a bit more in the search of pureness and exactness, where everything is aligned, ordered and perfect. We entered the world of mathematics: perfect geometry, number modulus alignments,..

To break the perfection, we allowed ourselves to enter the organic world of plotters, trying to add back unpredictability with this analog machine. While the placement of the words remains exact, organic aspects appear with various ink effects and glitches, as seen with the different shades that appear on the previous plot.

Despite the difference, there are a lot of shared ideas between the two paradigms. In plotting we also embrace the long and time consuming effort of slowly drawing something with pens. We are indeed in the paradigm of drawing strokes in contrast to the printer ink jet paradigm.

These are accelerated timelapses, these big plot took around 10 hours to do:

Sometimes, you reach the end of the pen capacity. This plot is plotting the word "determination" for a very long time. Determination in the robot to end the plot regardless of the pen state!

We can also push the boundaries to extremes that the pen plotter can easily do. This small 21 cm plot took about 4 hours to do, and contains almost 2000 words stacked in a very dense spiral.

A quick technical look at the generator

The project started with Arthur Simony writing letters, in their most canonical form:

To encode the letters, we simply used the SVG format – acting like a font face. Each letter is identified with an inkscape layer, named after the letter, and basically has a <path> curve. The letters are vertically aligned and the algorithm can figure out the rest. In the layer name, we also use some extra characters like < and > to indicate how letters can be attached to sibling letters (some letters are more cursive than others). Because indeed, when the words are recomposed, the algorithm will figure out how the letters should be attached also based on the position of the stroke ends.

At first, it felt a bit reinventing the wheel of what is typography, but actually we had no other choice: unlike most fonts (where 99% of typos are using the fill mode, suitable for printers), we need the stroke paths that the pen plotter will follow with the pen. We will also try to limit the amount of pen up (as it's mostly cursive writing).

In the end, from the programming perspective, I also needed a very simple way to have the letters directly embedded in the code of the generator and that I can then easily translate, scale, rotate and project them into arbitrary curves – and without having to use a font library.

@greweb's past work regarding using spirals in generative art and pen plotting

Spirals has always been a fascinating primitive to play with especially in the context of pen plotting: it allows homogeneous filling of a surface without lifting the pen and I love how to challenges the pen and paper interaction in all possible ways: a spiral will inevitably go through all possible angles.

With retrospective, I see how much of my past work is actually fundamentally based on spirals.

This prototype eventually lead me to create the generator Plottable Slimes also based on spirals.

redeemed plot coming from:

As you can see, I've been fascinated to also approach realism and figurative work with gen art and pen plotting and it's amazing to still achieve it with simple primitives that are spirals.

But beside figurative drawing, the possibility to approach realistic handwriting with the plotter. I've been trying different ideas along writing words with plotters.

@greweb's past work regarding generative handwriting in pen plotting

Plotters have a significant history with the idea to use them for handwriting. They have been used in the past in order to automate the physical signature of documents.

With more modern and efficient plotters, it is very interesting to explore various ideas on how we can combine automation and words.

I have myself been experimenting with various ways to associate generative art, pen plotters and handwriting. Let's see some:

The most early stage of my cursive text framework, repeated with destructive shaking effect.

A Koop.xyz live stream where everyone was able to write words on the plot!

A reverse timelapse of brush drawing a poem from Shakespeare

See you soon!

In conclusion, I want to say again I am so honored to have met and collaborated with Arthur Simony on this project. I can't wait to hear what you think.

See you soon at achetezdelart.com gallery!