Solar Winds

risographic artist book (2024)

#sigil-magic, #generative-art, #creative-coding, #stable-diffusion, #p5.js, #artist-book, #risograph

Handbound artist book. First edition of 30. Risograph black and gold on 80lb paper.

If a solstice is a portal, a threshold, it is an opportunity to circulate in the anticipatory and retrospective dimensions of place and time. In the dead of the long, dark Chicago winter of 2024/25, this book's linking with the solstice brought an opportunity for spiritual preparation for the indefatigable sun's return. What will summer's solar winds bring?

I created the images using a creative workflow I developed in ComfyUI StableDiffusion and processed/manipulated thereafter using computer vision implementations in p5.js and the p5.riso library. Many of the images use the same underlying Perlin noise matrix with slightly different prompts, sample values, and other parameters.

Each page is a sigil for half year between the winter and summer solstices, speculative crystallizations-in-process of nascent political, ecological, cosmological wills or energies. The images Perlin noise matrices, psuedorandomly generated greyscale textures invisible in the final result, are mother liquors for potential becoming activated by my interventions (nudges, swerves) which condition the becoming. Page spreads show two images generated from the "same" Perlin noise mother liquor, speculative diagrams of different becomings.