Riffing on Daily Minimal no.661 series 2

Unpacking the logic that is built into a design is one one my favorite things to do. It's relaxing, very flow-inducing. While there are invariably multiple "right" or effective paths to get to the eventual result that is represented in the finished design, different paths are more elegant. The challenge is to find the simplest path . . . that is, it's really easy to find a method that works, but can you find a brief explanation that also creates flexibility to change the design, and represent it in a way that you can share with others?

The idea of reverse engineering a design makes a whole other kind of art appreciation emerge. Lots of stuff that I just enjoyed in the past becomes completely distracting. Daily Minimal, "an ongoing artistic performance based on minimalism and geometry" by Pierre V., is a parade of systematic drawing studies that begs to be unpacked. I fixated on this one, no. 661 series 2, a few weeks ago.

Systematic, balanced, awesome. If you weren't going to draw it one piece at a time, how might you think about doing it? And how to do it with variations.

I figured the basis is an array of wedges, so let's start there and then figure out the rest later

Starting with the basics of a Center and a Point

Then deriving a vector from center to Point

Using that vector to derive a line, and rotation of that line around the center

Lofting those lines to make a surface

Then repeat this process with a whole bunch of starter points and various rotations

So far so good, but this is where things get interesting. There's a visual assumption of 3 dimensionality here, despite the aggressive flatness of the graphics. The sense of overlap, combination, and negative space is pretty rich in the original. So I figured making an actual 3 dimensional aspect and working back to a 2D was the approach

Extrude everything up, but in a random step, so assortments of extrusions end up at the same elevation

Union the whole thing into a solid, so you get big planes of continuous surface

Grab all the horizontal surfaces and move them down to the same level

Thicken the surfaces and make a thin shell to create space between

Now I can just start manufacturing new ones with different densities, # of pieces, etc.

All fine, but eventually I want to plot these on my pen plotter, so I need to make a crap-ton of poché. I was using some hatch-fill tools in Inkscape, but found that it was just faster and better controls to do a giant intersection in Dynamo.

All done! Ready to export 718 x 6 curves to an SVG file.

Dynamo File. (Uses some of the Math.Random function enhancements added in 2.10, which you can get here or make sure you have a 2022 version of Revit, Alias, Advance Steel, Civil 3D, FormIt, or Robot Structural Analysis,)