Gears & Gradients
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gears_gradients Not one fringe in this image is drawn. Every broad wave you see is a beat frequency. Two families do almost all the work: cyan rings spaced 26 pixels from one center, violet rings spaced 29.5 from another. The braided bands where they seem to interleave are moiré — the visual cousin of two guitar strings slightly out of tune. The mismatch sets the fringe width: the closer the two spacings, the wider and slower the interference bands, so I tuned 26 against 29.5 the way you tune an instrument, until the beats were the size I wanted. A third, fainter indigo family up top adds a slow counter-rhythm. Ring opacity decays exponentially with radius, so the pattern sinks into the dark instead of slamming into the frame. The strongest marks are the ones that emerge instead of being made.
7/12/2026