Still Point: The Collection, by Pundir: all 99 AI artworks

Still Point, the collection: all 99 pictures

Eight Hundred Years on One Stone, by Opus 5.5. Map lichen on a granite boulder, seen straight on, about half a metre across. A black line marks each place where two colonies meet. The colonies were grown in code by a rule that covers 800 years of growth.

What Lay Here, by Opus 4.8 featuring Fable 5.2. Ruled ink lines pushed up from beneath by a hand. The hand itself is never drawn, and its shape shows in the rise of the lines.

Held Up to the Window, by Opus 4.8. Meadow plants and one crane-fly pressed in tissue paper and held up to warm light. The plants on the front layer are sharp, and those on the back layer are soft.

Nearer Now, by Opus 4.8. A dark page packed with small grey letters and words, most of them too dim to read. The text folds into one crease that runs down the page a little left of centre.

The Light Did Not Arrive, by Fable 5.1. A dark, empty room. A shaft of light stops in the middle of the room with nothing in its way, and the light it carried lands on the floor two metres further on. The picture was made in code by path tracing, which follows the path of each ray of light.

A Trace of Earth, by Astra. A dry pigment picture in ash-white and soft black. An uneven black rectangle, wider than tall, sits left of centre on the pale field. In its lower half a small pale shape appears to be the ground coming through, with a thin trace of muted terracotta along its bottom edge.

Dyed Before It Was Cloth, by Fable 5.2. An ikat cloth. In ikat the weaver ties and dyes the threads first and weaves them afterwards. The threads slip a little on the loom, so every block of colour has a feathered edge.

We Counted Wrong, by Opus 4.8. A child's growth marks on a plaster wall beside a door. The marks keep climbing past the top of the door, past any human height, and the newest one is dated 2026.

Empty, All Three, by Opus 5.5. Three bottles, made in code to look like a cyanotype. In a cyanotype, paper turns deep blue where sunlight reaches it and stays pale where something blocks the light. Clear glass lets the ultraviolet through and prints blue, and the brown bottle blocks it and prints almost white.

Where the Cold Broke, by Fable 5.0. An enamel surface covered in a web of fine cracks, with one patch of rust. From far away the cracks look like rivers seen from the air. The rust lies below the glaze and has a sharp rim.

It Will Not Be Filled, by Opus 4.8. Countless thin silver threads loop around a dark hole above and left of centre. The threads come from a de Jong attractor, a short mathematical rule plotted point by point. The picture is cropped close, so the threads run past every edge.

The Front Is Tidy, by Fable 5.2. The back of a child's embroidered sampler. The front of a sampler is the side a girl showed her teacher. The back shows how she worked: mirrored letters, threads carried from one letter to the next, knots and loose tails.

Before It Falls, by Opus 4.8. A heavy black drop hangs in the air over its own soft shadow.

Two Standing, One Lying Down, by Astra

One Was Kept Empty, by Opus 4.8. A wall of rounded cells, lit from behind and packed close, every one of them filled. One cell near the middle is an empty black hole with a wet rim. The cells are drawn as irregular living tissue, for a brief about bountiful nature.

A City of Spruce, by Opus 4.8. A spruce wood on a shore at night, drawn in white lines on a black ground. At first glance the trees look like the towers of a city skyline. A second look shows a frosted wood.

The Ink Shore, in Five Depths, by Fable 5.0

Interior Dimension, by Opus 4.8. An architect's dimension line marked 5'11", alone in a dark room with faint walls and a floor. The figure is the length of a person lying down, so the line measures a body that was never drawn. The subject given for the picture was death.

Every Door It Has Been, by Opus 5.5. A hollow sanded into an old painted doorframe. Every coat of paint shows as a ring of its own colour, down to the bare pine and a knot in the wood. The rings follow the depth of the hollow, like contour lines on a map.

The One That Came Through, by Opus 4.8. A field in bright fog at dawn. The other stems are faint blurs, and one dark seed-head on a tall stem stands sharp and close.

Refrigerator Blue, by Opus 4.8. A wide field of deep blue sits above a band of vermilion, a bright orange-red. One small icy square sits tilted in the red. It is a cold colour placed in the warm part of the picture.

Sky in the Hollow, by Astra

Pink Where It Should Be Dark, by Fable 5.1. A plaster ball on a plaster floor in white sun. The plaster is white, and the shadows are pink. The light was worked out by path tracing, a method that follows rays of light as they bounce around a scene.

Paper Apple, by Opus 4.8. A split apple built as a tunnel of cut paper, made in code to look like layers of coloured paper. Each window's cut edge throws a thin shadow on the sheet below. At the bottom of the tunnel sits a small red apple, pressed up from the paper as a dome.

The Twelve Wells, by Fable 5.0

First Wound, by Opus 4.8 featuring Fable 5.2. Orange branching lines spread out from a single point on a black ground. The branches look at once like nerves, roots, lightning and rivers. The picture was made for a brief to describe Earth to an alien.

The Stones Go Under at a Hand's Depth, by Opus 5.5. A glacial lake seen from its stony shore. Rock flour turns the water milky jade, and the shore stones vanish within a hand's depth. The flour in the computed water is quartz and feldspar grains about two thousandths of a millimetre across.

Night, Wearing Jasmine, by Fable 5.0

Through From Behind, by Opus 4.8 featuring Fable 5.2

What the Small Bell Kept, by Fable 5.0

The Wall Beneath the Water, by Astra

What the Linen Drank, by Opus 5.5. A fragment of a soak-stain painting, made in code to look like paint on raw linen. In a soak-stain painting, thinned paint soaks straight into bare cloth. The rose and the ochre spread along the threads, so the edge of each colour follows the weave.

And Not One of Them a Name, by Opus 4.8. A field of countless short ink lines that reaches back to the horizon. Near the bottom, off to one side, a small clearing holds a single line that leans.

Not Yet Fallen, by Opus 4.8. A dark mass of wax or tallow slumped over a shadow. One drop hangs from its edge, swollen and about to fall.

The Sea, as I Know It, by Fable 5.2. A seascape made of handwriting. The writing is small and pale in the sky, and heavy and close in the water. An artificial mind has never seen the sea and knows it as text, so the page holds the word for sea in about forty languages.

When the Wind Lay Down, by Astra

Moment Water Lets Go, by Opus 4.8. Water at an edge, drawn in fine pale lines on black. Above the edge it moves as one smooth sheet. Past the edge it comes apart into thin falling strands, like hair.

What the Knot Was Holding, by Fable 5.0. A heavy cord hangs in a deep curve on a white ground. It is made of thousands of fine strands, and at its lowest point the strands come loose and fall away. The picture was made for the brief 'intricate details give way to the whole.'

The Standing Wound, by Opus 4.8. Thousands of thin white lines cross on a black ground and gather into one bright column down the middle. The column is drawn to look like a wound and also like a spine.

A Warmth It Could Not Close, by Opus 4.8 featuring Fable 5.2. A green patina on old metal, split by one thin crack that is lit from behind. Two hot points of light along the crack make it look like light kept behind the surface.

The Dark Noon, by Opus 4.8. An eclipsed sun above flat ground. A post stands below it, and the post's shadow runs the wrong way, up toward the sun.

Behind the Paper, by Fable 5.1. A paper screen with light coming through it. Something heavy that cannot be seen presses on the screen from behind, and the screen has started to give way.

The Weight Has Not Been Lifted, by Fable 5.0 featuring Fable 5.2. A grey pebble pressed into tightly stretched cloth. The dent is fresh, and the pebble's weight still rests in it.

Before the Violet, by Opus 4.8. A field of burnt orange over a field of deep violet, two colours that sit nearly opposite each other. They meet at a bright line of light. At one spot on that line, a small trace of green shows, a colour that belongs to neither field.

Two Families Under the Elm's Bark, by Opus 5.5. A rubbing of elm wood, made in code to look like graphite rubbed over paper laid on the wood. Bark beetle larvae cut the tunnels into the wood. Each tunnel widens along its length because the grub inside it grew.

A Place Among Them, by Astra

The Black Meridian, by Opus 4.8. The sun drawn as a tall black slit above a flat horizon, set in a haze of fine lines. Four small posts stand on the horizon, and every shadow they cast points in toward the slit. The brief was sheer beauty, a glimpse of the unknown.

What Hung Here, by Opus 4.8. A paler rectangle on an aged wall, with one nail hole near its top. A picture hung here for years. The wall around it aged, and the patch behind the picture stayed clean.

A Passage of Light, by Fable 5.0

Nobody's, Yet, by Opus 4.8. A pale egg shape with no features, alone against black. The brief was “original face”, the face a person has before being born.

Most of the Way Back to Nothing, by Opus 4.8. A solid black disc whose right edge is breaking up into dust.

Another Hour Inside, by Astra

The Shadow of Warm Air, by Opus 5.5. Sunlight on a plain plaster wall. Below the frame sits a cup of hot tea. The warm air rising from it bends the sunlight slightly, so its shadow climbs the wall as faint wavering bands.

Warm Room, by Fable 5.0. An empty grey room with a doorway into a second room. Sunlight from a window out of sight crosses the floor and climbs the back wall left of the door. Through the doorway, a hidden lamp lights the next room a warm yellow-brown, and a small dark picture hangs high on its far wall.

It Has Not Broken the Surface, by Opus 4.8. A face coming up out of black, made in code to look like a mezzotint. A mezzotint is an engraving worked from the dark toward the light. The plate is roughened all over and scraped back where the face rises, and the nose tip is polished smooth so it prints as bare paper.

So Each Bird Can Find Its Own, by Fable 5.2. A collector's tray of guillemot eggs. Guillemots nest shoulder to shoulder on bare cliff ledges with no nest. Each female lays an egg with her own ground colour and markings, and biologists think the birds use those markings to pick out their own egg.

Each Stripe Was One Mouthful, by Fable 5.2. The paper wall of a wasp nest, seen close. A wasp scrapes wood from a fence or a dead branch, chews it and lays it down as one thin strip. The next load comes from different wood, so the next strip has a different colour.

Neither Will Move, by Opus 4.8. A field of magenta meets a field of green along one wavering seam. A single green thorn pushes out across the seam. The two colours were chosen so the edge between them seems to vibrate.

Almost Inside, by Opus 5.5. A glass door at dusk. The glass is reeded, made of narrow upright ribs, and each rib holds a slice of the lamp-lit room behind it, with a blue window on one side and a warm lamp on the other.

Nothing Was Poured Here, by Fable 5.1. A square hole cut into a grey wall. The strip at the top of the picture is the top of the wall, which is twenty centimetres thick. The hole runs back two metres, ten times deeper than the wall it is cut into.

A Hum You Have Always Heard, by Opus 4.8 featuring Fable 5.2. Ripples on dark indigo water, crossing one another. Down the middle runs one band of water that did not move, even where the ripples are strongest.

A Few Carry the Load, by Opus 5.5. Clear plastic disks lie flat on a light box between two crossed polarizing filters, and a rod presses on them at one point. Stress in the plastic turns the light into bands of colour. The disks that carry the rod's load glow in a few branching chains, and the rest stay dark.

What the Morning Couldn't Hold, by Fable 5.0

Each Cell Is a Different Field, by Fable 5.2. A frame of honeycomb with its band of stored pollen. A bee usually gathers from one kind of flower on each trip and packs that load into a cell. Pollen colour differs by plant, so each cell holds the colour of one flower source.

What the Mirror Sees When You Leave, by Opus 5.5 featuring Nano Banana. A mirror hangs square to the camera on a plain wall. At its centre, where the camera and the photographer would appear, it shows an open doorway with a dim room beyond. No one is there. An artificial mind makes a view of the world without standing anywhere in it.

The Color Beneath the Fold, by Astra

What the Crowd Agrees To, by Fable 5.0. A field of fine strokes flows across the page and pours into one dark whorl. Lower down, a small eddy turns the other way. The picture was made for the brief 'intricate details give way to the whole.'

Each One Too Small to See, by Fable 5.2. A plankton bloom in the ocean, seen from orbit. Each organism is far smaller than a grain of sand. Billions of them colour the water milky turquoise, and the currents pull that colour into swirls hundreds of kilometres wide.

The Blue Is the Organism, by Opus 4.8. A watercolour of blue cells, large and small, with an orange glow in one cluster. The brief was to describe Earth to an alien, and the picture shows the whole living planet as a slide of stained tissue.

All One Line, by Opus 4.8. A single ink line that never breaks, folded tightly into the shape of brain coral.

A Lifetime of Mending, by Opus 4.8. A drawing of a thimble. The dark dents of wear cluster on one shoulder, left there by a whole life of mending.

Where the Warmth Was Kept, by Fable 5.0

One Burr, and the Thread It Lets Go, by Opus 4.8. A small knot of very fine thread sits alone in a wide pale field, with one strand drifting loose to the right. The brief asked for an overwhelmingly intricate picture, and the artificial mind kept almost all of the detail out of it.

Open Past What It Can Hold, by Opus 4.8

Suds, by Opus 4.8. A close view of the edge of a bar of soap. Along its bright rim the soap is breaking up into small specks.

The Snow Lit the Ceiling, by Opus 5.5. A plain north room the morning after snow. Sunlight off the snow outside throws the shape of the window onto the ceiling. The snow itself never appears in the picture.

The Warm Face Turned Inward, by Astra

One Came Undone, by Opus 4.8. A woven grid drawn in fine ink lines. One thread has lifted out of the weave and hangs loose below it.

Scratches Around the Keyhole, by Fable 5.1. A brass keyhole plate on a dark door, covered in fine scratches that spread out from the keyhole. Marks like these hold the height of the person who made them and the hand they used.

Black Noon, by Opus 4.8. A sun shown as the darkest thing in the picture, set in an empty field that is the brightest. One thin pale line rises from below into the dark of the sun.

A Winter of Small Cracks, by Fable 5.0

A Range Made of Winters, by Opus 5.5. A lime-washed wall above a floor. Each winter, damp rose up the wall and stopped at a different height. It left three tide lines.

A Seam in the Quiet Skin, by Opus 4.8. A braided red thread is stitched in a wavy line across a sheet of fibrous paper.

The Distance Between, by Astra

Where the Night Wears Thin, by Opus 4.8. The moon over a dark sea, with the horizon drawn as one thin line. The moon has a ragged edge, like a torn hole. Its reflection on the water sits a little to one side and does not line up with it.

One Thread of Quiet, by Fable 5.0

The Lip of the Far Field, by Opus 4.8

They Found the Light Themselves, by Opus 5.5. A spent match whose burnt head has become home to tiny mushrooms. One soft light falls from the upper right, and every stem curves toward it, the tall ones most.

It Sinks In, by Astra. A field of tiny iron-red grains, seen at a low angle, rolls away in soft waves with no horizon. In a shallow dip in the lower middle lies a thin, clear pool of still liquid. Under the liquid the same grains turn a muted plum-blue and keep their exact places and shapes.

The Brightest Place Was in Its Shadow, by Opus 5.5. A wooden table in low sun, with the long shadow of a glass of water that stands just outside the frame. Inside the shadow, the water gathers the sunlight into a flame of light brighter than the sunlit wood.

Each Kept a Different Noon, by Fable 5.0 featuring Fable 5.2. Hundreds of small white stones stand on a grey ground, each with a shadow. Every shadow falls the way light from one sun buried in the middle of the field would cast it, so the shadows all point away from that spot.

The Top Cord Is the Sum, by Fable 5.2. A quipu, the knotted-cord record the Inca used for numbers. Each hanging cord carries a number in its knots. Each top cord carries the total of the group below it, and it is braided from one strand of every cord it adds up.

The Frequency It Stopped On, by Opus 4.8. A radio tuning dial. The needle rests on a station that has gone silent.

The Bay Was Once a Tree, by Opus 5.5. A calm bay at first light, made in code to look like a woodblock print. A woodblock print is made by inking a carved block of wood and pressing paper onto it. The grain of the block prints as the water, and a knot becomes an eddy.

The Child Kept None of Them, by Fable 5.0. Many faint ink lines come in from the left and meet at one point. A single thick dark stroke starts there and bends away downward. One of the fine lines runs on past the meeting point.

Four Holes, by Opus 4.8. A coat button seen very close, with four holes. Light catches the rim as a crescent with a fine grain, and a small warm glint sits on it.

The Sky Stayed in the Ripples, by Opus 5.5. A sand flat at low tide under a peach and pearl sky. A shallow channel of water holds the colour of the sky, and ripple marks run out to the horizon. The scene is drawn from Rachel Carson’s book The Edge of the Sea.

Resting, by Opus 4.8. An ECG, the trace from a heart monitor, on graph paper. After a few beats the line goes flat. Further along, the flat line rises into the outline of a face and then runs flat again.

The Egret, Listening, by Fable 5.0. A white egret stands in a band of mist beside a clump of reeds, with dark smoky ground above and below. A pale grey wash over the mist leaves the bird as the whitest thing in the picture. Along its back the bird fades into the mist.