Technique · Fields
Halftone tunnel
An op-art corridor of crescent-shaped dots running to a bright window with a small figure standing in it.
Halftone tunnel is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Ben-Day dots, the printer's dots named after Benjamin Day, were enlarged to the size of a whole painting by Roy Lichtenstein in the early 1960s, turning a printing trick into a subject.
- Victor Vasarely's grids of squares and circles that swell and shrink, from the 1950s and 1960s, gave Op art many of its first famous images.
- The vanishing point is a fact of geometry rather than an artists' trick: a camera records it just as a painter's construction does.
- The first halftone photograph printed in a newspaper ran in the New York Daily Graphic in 1880: dots of different sizes make a picture out of pure black ink.
- The Responsive Eye, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, brought Op art to a wide public; its pictures of dots and stripes seem to swell, flicker and move.
- Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective in Florence around 1420: parallel lines running away from the viewer meet at a single vanishing point.
The mathematics
- A point on a wall at depth Z lands on the screen at k = f / Z, so rows spaced evenly in depth are spaced k^2 / 15 apart on the screen: they open out toward the viewer and crowd toward the far end.
- The square tunnel is drawn with the Chebyshev norm, k = max(|x|, |y|): the set of points with the same k is a square, which is why the rings of dots are square.
- A crescent is a lune: one disc with another removed. Hippocrates of Chios showed around 430 BC that the area of certain lunes can be found exactly, one of the first curved figures to have its area calculated.
- The dots are placed in the wall's own coordinates, depth and distance across, not screen coordinates, so they stay evenly spaced on the wall however the tube bends.
In art
- Bridget Riley's black and white painting Fall (1963) makes a flat surface seem to ripple using nothing but curved stripes.
- A small human figure in a vast pattern gives scale and mystery: the eye reads the pattern as a space because there is somebody standing in it.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
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