Tangents started from Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak, which I have been looking at since it came out in 2021. Cherniak's own starting point was Armin Hofmann's Graphic Design Manual from 1965, which builds everything from point, line and plane. I wanted to try the same idea, a string wound around pegs, but quieter and with more attention to colour. The whole system is tangent lines and arcs, the path a real string would take, and the range of shapes that comes out of that one rule still surprises me, bodies, bows, webs, and sometimes something that looks like a face or an animal.

Most of the time went into the string's constraints rather than into features. The string isn't allowed to cut through a disc or to pass very close to one, it can't double back around a very small peg and leave a thin spike across the fill, and it can't cross itself in a way that leaves a tiny sliver of colour. When a route breaks one of these rules the program removes or flips a peg and checks again, and if that doesn't work it draws a new route. All 1000 pieces pass these checks.

The colour system is based on Josef Albers. A piece only has a background, a fill, a line and some discs, so the relationships between those few colours are everything. The Albers palettes are built like his Homage to the Square, as steps within one colour climate, and a few of his exercises are in the pieces directly: fills so close in value to the background that the edge almost disappears, discs painted in the exact middle between background and fill, and overlaps drawn as transparent film.

Traits that come from a specific artist are named after that artist, and the lineage goes through them in the order the work was made.

There is no roadmap, no token beyond the artwork itself, and no membership or utility. The generator is small and public, so as long as a browser can run JavaScript the piece can be regenerated from its number.

All 1000 pieces already exist and can be browsed on the Explore page. Minting happens on an external platform rather than on this page, and the link will be in the fact sheet when the sale opens. A mint doesn't generate a new piece, it assigns you one of the unclaimed ones at random, up to ten in one transaction, and there is no allowlist. The contract address will be published in the fact sheet and in the repository before the sale.