Every visit, the gallery paints again.
STRATA holds exactly one painting. It was begun the moment you arrived — a few thousand particles walking a curl-noise field, laying pigment where the current carries them. No one has seen this edition before you. No one will see it after.
Six editions the curators refused to destroy.
Every re-mint erases a painting. These six were pardoned — seeds pinned under glass so the field repaints them, stroke for stroke, exactly as first shown. Walk the wall; each plaque names its palette.
How the field paints.
There is no brush and no image to copy. There is only a field of directions, a crowd of particles, and time.
The field is laid down
A seed — one integer — feeds mulberry32, and the numbers it breathes out build a lattice of fractal value noise. Sampled anywhere on the canvas, the noise returns an angle. The whole painting-to-be is already present here, invisible, like grain in uncut stone.
The particles walk
A few thousand particles drop onto the canvas and do the only thing they know: ask the field which way, step, ask again. Each step leaves a stroke of near-transparent pigment. None of them knows about composition. The field knows.
The sediment settles
Strokes accumulate like silt — thousands of layers a second at first, then slower, thinner, quieter. Color is geological: each particle is born into a stratum of its palette and carries that ink for life. When the surface reads as stone, the edition is on view.
A painting you can regenerate is not a copy of anything. It is a place the mathematics has agreed to hold still.— from the founding deed of the gallery, 2026