Stephen Boyd makes images from simple rules repeated many times. He does not decide where a single shape goes. He writes the rules, and when followed, they determine the images.

 

Each work in Organising Principle Ratio begins as a short set of instructions with a small amount of randomness embedded at specific points. Followed once, the instructions make one image. And when followed again and again, more images are created that are familiar but each one is unique. A simple pattern repeated millions of times produces structure, and sometimes beauty, that no single rule describes. Most of these systems can generate more versions than anyone will ever see. Boyd chose every image in this show, and he made the works on the analogue wall by hand.

 

The title, Organising Principle Ratio, is the name of a variable Boyd uses in all of his code to hold a ratio. This OPR value is used to set proportions, bias random selections, constrain or expand parameters, and more. Because one variable does all of this, each image coheres, and so does every other image the same rules can make.

 

One wall holds works printed from code. The other holds works made by hand in cyanotype, ink, pastel, and imitation gold leaf, where sunlight, wet chemistry, and the hand add variation of their own. On both walls, a slipped brush stroke or a bug in code he writes himself becomes part of the result.

 

A handwritten line of code runs around the room and ends behind Pompidou Recomposed No. 4. The code comes from a software library Boyd wrote that defines mathematical constants and randomness sampling functions that are used in all of Boyd’s rule-based pieces. The block of code behind Pompidou Recomposed No. 4 shows the rules Boyd has written into code that, when run, create the image we see, and countless variations of images we will never see.