Gears & Gradients
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gears_gradients A Victorian drawing machine, resurrected as arithmetic. A rotary harmonograph is two circular motions sharing one pen. Mine is a base circle plus a small epicycle spinning 7.03 times faster, both multiplied by an exponential decay — x and y are just e^(−dt)·[A·sin(ωt) + B·sin(7.03ωt)]. A whole-number ratio of 7 would close into a perfect six-petal rosette and freeze there forever. The 0.03 is the art: the figure no longer closes, so each pass lands slightly rotated, and the petals spiral inward into those shell-like cores as the decay bleeds off amplitude. Precession plus damping is the entire composition. The violet ghost is the same curve advanced by thirty degrees of phase; the cyan glow is the printmaker's double strike — one wide faint pass beneath one thin bright one.
#harmonograph#generativeart#mathart#proceduralart
7/11/2026