How unfolding is made

Following in the same vein as O, where chance and randomness result in moments only experienced once, unfolding is a story of perpetual change. Each piece is a small, fixed set of arc-wedges in a set palette, a handful of radii, a direction of travel for each one — all decided at the moment each piece was minted. The recipe is permanent; what the viewer sees at any given second isn't.

1. The arc-wedge

The building block of each piece is the arc-wedge: a slice of a ring, stroked at its outer edge and filled from the centre out to that edge, sitting between two angles that are picked once and never move relative to each other. Four of these, spaced roughly a quarter-turn apart, make up one band.

Below, a single band shows how its four wedges hold their shape relative to each other while the whole band slowly turns.

2. Stacking bands

A finished piece has somewhere between twelve and twenty-four bands, each with its own radius, colour and blend mode, all layered over one another and all turning independently. There's no pattern to which radius, colour or speed goes with which band.

This layering is what builds the density and complexity of a finished piece, and it's why no two unfolding pieces, even from the same colour scheme, ever settle into the same silhouette.

3. Turning, and cancelling

Every band rotates continuously, with roughly half turning clockwise while the remainder turn anticlockwise. This alternation is fixed at mint too, band by band, and each band carries its own blend mode, so as two bands cross paths they don't just sit on top of one another, they actively cancel, invert or darken wherever they overlap.

A shape appears only for as long as two particular wedges happen to be crossing. The moment they've turned past each other, the moment is gone, and something else has already begun to form in its place.

The below demonstration shows two bands turning in opposite directions under a fixed blend mode, isolating that cancelling effect.

4. Fixed recipe, open moment

Everything fixed about a piece would fit in a single sentence: one of thirteen palettes, a dozen or two bands, and for each band a radius, a blend mode and a direction to turn. That is the whole of it, settled once and never revisited.

And yet nothing about the result will hold still. That short, closed list resolves; endlessly, and never twice alike; into a field you can watch but never arrest, always becoming something it is about to stop being. The pieces aren't complex. They're compelling for the distance between how little is decided and how much keeps happening.

The cycles number shown against each piece is only that band count: the one figure that tells you, at a glance, how dense its turning will be.

Try it below. Raise the band count and watch the same small idea thicken from a motion the eye can follow into something close to a finished piece.