Looking for the atlas? It has not gone anywhere. The toy now lives at /atlas, and every old link still works.

Open the atlas
Pretty Cloud

Photographs of things
that have never existed

A film camera for things that have never existed, with real glass in front of it.

The Hopf fibration: nested luminous rings in yellow, magenta and blue on black.
Plate I, the Hopf fibration, photographed through the 1840 Petzval portrait at f/3.67. Every closed curve here is the preimage of one point on an ordinary sphere, and any two of them, chosen anywhere, are linked exactly once. The atlas itself draws all of that perfectly sharp, because it has no lens: every point lands where the arithmetic says. Putting real glass in front spoils that on purpose. A Petzval cannot flatten its field, so the corners are focused at a different distance from the middle and go soft, and the out-of-focus highlights stretch as the pupil is seen at an angle. Neither is an effect applied afterwards. It is what those radii do.

The subjects are mathematical objects: sixty-two of them, each a few lines of arithmetic rather than a model on a disk. The camera is a four-by-five sheet that exists only as a program: the focal length falls out of a declared field of view, the aperture is a real entrance pupil computed from it, and the exposure accumulates one pass at a time and converges, because that is what an exposure does.

In front of it is real glass. A thousand and nine objectives, 1840 to 2007, each traced from the radii and thicknesses its own patent records. Their faults are not dialled in. They are what the tracing produces, and where a design refuses to trace honestly the camera says so rather than substituting the nearest survivor.

None of that makes a picture better. It makes it checkable, which is a different property and a more useful one.

Play

The atlas runs in a browser. Sixty-two objects, drawn a million points at a time, with the levers exposed, which is how anybody, including me, finds out what they do.

Open the atlas

Give

The large-format practice has a name, platonography, and its biggest photographs are public works: gigapixel frames computed by whoever shows up, verified by one another, painting themselves onto a public page as they land.

The public works

Read

Volume one is the instrument described the way a camera is described: what it is, what it measures, and what it does not do, with the absences printed at the same size as the measurements.

The book

Own

Prints are made one at a time, on cotton rag. Each carries the full parameter set it was made from, so a print made next year can be measured against the one before it.

Prints