PALIMPSEST by Unruly Unroll is a never-ending journey towards nothing, wherein the artist asks you to suspend your desire for finality. When viewed, PALIMPSEST rolls along in paths that appear to resolve. However, those resolutions quickly disappear, causing your eyes to wander until they find the next path to focus on, thus perfectly illustrating Unruly Unroll’s description:

"Tossed around by great currents to a point where they forget their original course, they wander blindly, vanishing into oblivion for others to take their place..."

Due to the nature of the animation, these wandering lines create a sense of unease that’s frantic and unwieldy yet meditative.

You want this to resolve. You want the grid to appear. You want the red to dominate.

It doesn’t and won’t. The dynamic play and tension are infinite, not unlike life for those who wander around in it. Take, for example, PALIMPSEST #97. The lines move up and to the right with ease and grace, appearing quite orderly and as if they want to stay on a simple grid.

PALIMPSEST #97

But in #109, the action couldn’t be more different. The lines move faster and less organized, creating a wild cloud-like structure with no discernible direction or orientation. These are the true wanderers in the series.

PALIMPSEST #109

PALIMPSEST is long-form generative art at its finest. It’s simple in nature and fantastically complex by design. The individual pieces are deterministic in that they always begin the same and follow the same paths, yet due to the frenetic pace with which the lines move, the paths never get stale, making for endless wanderings.