Two paired stacks of notched rectangles, joined by short connectors whose only free property is where they sit.
One stroke, not a stack
Each tower looks like a column of rectangles and is not. It is a single continuous
outline that zigzags: out to a random horizontal position, down a row, back, down
again.
That is why the towers read as hand-drawn staircases rather than as stacked boxes —
there are no internal horizontal lines, because the stroke never crosses its own
interior.
Three rows. The vertical spacing is exactly regular; the horizontal step positions are
not.
Seven rows.
Structure, and one variable
The row height and the row gap are constants. The tower width is a constant. The only
quantity the generator decides is where each zigzag step lands horizontally.
That is a deliberately narrow dose. With no randomness the towers would read as a
diagram; with several free parameters they would read as noise. One continuous variable
per row gives an outline that is clearly regular in one axis and clearly not in the
other, which is what makes it read as drawn.
Ten rows. Small filled squares are tucked into the notches the zigzag leaves — the only
filled marks in the piece, and the only use of the second colour.
Fourteen.
Full height: eighteen rows, twice.
Two towers, exchanged
DrawTower(canvas, offsetX, offsetY, PrimaryColor, SecondaryColor, LeftSeed, rows);
DrawTower(canvas, offsetX + TowerW + TowerGap, offsetY + RightTowerOffsetY,
SecondaryColor, PrimaryColor, RightSeed, rows);
Different seeds, swapped colours and, in some variants, a small vertical displacement.
The two towers are therefore siblings rather than mirror images — the same process twice,
which reads as a pair, where a mirror would read as one symmetric object.
The presets tune density, scale, spacing and seeds as well as palette. Aurora Coral is a
dense offset pair; Gold Ice Monument uses seven large rows; Oxide Glacier compresses
twenty-two rows into the same canvas.
Five renderings
| Rendering | Rows | Character |
|---|
| Aurora Coral | 18 | dense, close and slightly offset |
| Ultramarine Ember | 10 | broad forms on warm paper |
| Orchid Chartreuse | 14 | narrow towers, open centre |
| Oxide Glacier | 22 | fine-grained and compressed |
| Gold Ice Monument | 7 | sparse, large-scale forms |
Museum presentation
The Aurora Coral composition is also shown once as a finished gallery piece. A warm
wall, dark frame and generous pale mat set off the luminous lines, while the art window
crops away incidental outer canvas without crowding either tower. The framing is a
presentation layer around the unchanged generator rather than a framed copy of every
colour variant.
Determinism
SeededRandom — the project’s stable Xoshiro256StarStar — is created once per tower
from the preset’s fixed seed and consumed once per row, top to bottom.
