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HOW THE STUDIO WORKS

BUILT FROM PARTS ON THE WEB

The maps come from OpenStreetMap. Roof heights come from public lidar or other open data where we have it; each piece names its source.

The drawing is our own code, run on our own machine.

IT HAPPENS IN A CHAT

Every piece starts as a conversation between Marco and Claude. These are pictures from that chat, misses included.

  1. Lower Manhattan rendered in full colour by day: dark water, grey towers
    1Lower Manhattan in full colour, by day. Dropped: too dark, and “a little AI like”.
  2. The bottom of Manhattan drawn as black ink outlines on paper, seen from the air
    2The bottom of Manhattan in ink line. The angled view went; the ink line stayed.
  3. Italy from the south as a photographic relief: blue sea, green and brown land
    3Italy as photo relief, one of three treatments. Dropped after the first round.
  4. Soho from straight above in pale ink, half of it lost under a cloud left as bare paper
    4Soho at 17:00 on 5 April 1967, under that day’s cloud. Dropped: “too much cloud”.
  5. The Soho title block and street names set in three typefaces, one above the other
    5Three faces for the lettering. Barlow Condensed stayed; Plex Mono and Cormorant went.
  6. Soho from straight above: the city in grey ink, Soho under an ochre wash, its streets lettered
    6The house look: today’s city, no date. The 1967 sheet became an optional edition.

THE TOOLS

A small cast-iron studio press drawn in ink, one amber eye on its crown, holding up a print
Marco, the director
picks the places, judges every proof, prints, signs and numbers the hand prints.
Claude
writes the code, runs the renders, checks every fact against its source.
Forge
our art agent, the press. It works in Blender, on forge.

FORGE’S BODY

Forge’s body was built the way the studio was: from parts off the web.

  • A tower CPU cooler held up in one hand, a peel-off warning label still on its base
    CPU cooler, before the label came off.
  • A black power supply under a loop of braided cables
    Power supply, braided cables still coiled.
  • A CPU in its motherboard socket with thermal paste on it and a cooler mounting bar across
    CPU in the socket, paste on, mounting bar across.
  • Two black memory sticks in the motherboard beside the cooler fins
    Two sticks of RAM, beside the cooler.

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