Every camera lens has a small flaw it would rather you didn’t notice.
Glass bends red, green and blue light by slightly different amounts, so along the sharp edge of a shape the three colors don’t quite land in the same place. You get a thin fringe of color. Photographers call it chromatic aberration, and lens makers spend a lot of money making it disappear.
Adam Fuhrer went looking for it on purpose. The artist and software engineer draws spheres, cubes, draped fabric and human figures out of thousands of fine lines, then pulls every line apart into its red, green and blue. The flaw becomes the whole picture.
That one is our favorite. A perfect globe of contour lines comes undone at the bottom into loose, drifting strands, and it reads less like geometry and more like a jellyfish that wandered into a math textbook! The cube is a close second. Its top half holds together as a tidy wireframe while the bottom crumbles into falling pixels, as if someone hit print and walked away too soon.
The work makes more sense once you know where Fuhrer started. Hundreds of his pieces are pen plots, drawings made by a machine dragging a real pen across real paper, and these new ones keep the plotter’s habits. Each form is built from one kind of line, repeated over and over until a shape appears. Then they add the one thing a pen can’t do, which is glow. Written in JavaScript and finished as vector drawings, they live on a black screen, where the split colors shimmer like the edge of an old projector slightly out of focus.
“Photographers call it chromatic aberration, and lens makers spend a lot of money making it disappear.“
The figures are the quiet surprise. A person made only of wobbling sine waves somehow has posture. A face appears out of nothing but rows of dashes that bulge where a nose and lips should be. Your eye does most of the work, and it’s a little unsettling how willingly it does.
Narrowing it down was hard for us too, so here are six more. Swipe or use the arrows.
More than 80 works carry the chromatic aberration tag on Fuhrer's site so far, and the series is still growing. He shares new pieces on Instagram too. For more art that bends how we see, wander through our guide to the most extraordinary paintings and illustrations.
All images by Adam Fuhrer. Via kottke.org.
