“Latitudes” is part of a solo exhibition at MONO Tunis Gallery in October 2023, curated by Kenza Zouari.

"Latitudes" is a series of infinite animations in which a number of long extruded shapes travel in set directions with only minimal deflections. On their journey, shapes cross over one another while occasionally encountering loops, beams, and numbered asteroids.

From the earliest sketches, questions emerged: Where are they going? Who are they? Will their fall or race ever end? Where is the finish line? Or as Italo Calvino’s character Qfwfq, in the story The Form of Space, while falling, assuming he is falling, occasionally moving in an upward direction, maybe just flowing along an unknown path in the space without above and below, wonders if his trajectory will intersect with his love-longing in the future. On this never-ending fall, passing by one or many universes revolving around them, he contemplates all the positive and negative outcomes, dreaming of their parallels eventually meeting:

“In this alternation of hopes and apprehensions, I continued to fall, constantly peering into the depths of space to see if anything heralded an immediate or future change in our condition. A couple of times I managed to glimpse a universe, but it was far away and seemed very tiny, well off to the right or to the left; I barely had time to make out a certain number of galaxies like shining little dots collected into superimposed masses which revolved with a faint buzz, when everything would vanish as it had appeared, upwards or to one side, so that I began to suspect it had only been a momentary glare in my eyes.

[…] unwound in continuous, parallel, straight lines which mean nothing beyond themselves in their constant flow, never meeting, just as we never meet in our constant fall […]”

To all on unknown latitudes, exploring forms of the space.

Controls:

[p] key or click/tap for pause/play animation

[a] turn auto rotate on/off

[n] rotate view clockwise

Made with p5.js and chroma.js.

Minting 3 tokens at a time will generate a series of Latitudes in all 3 possible directions in the same color palette.