Munari’s Peano curves (2018)

Bruno Munari made a series of prints, collages, and paintings in the 1970s based on the geometry of Peano curves, named after Guiseppe Peano, the nineteenth-century Italian mathematician who was the first to name and describe them. Space-filling curves are continuous curves bounded by a unit square; they are most commonly studied in two- and three-dimensional space, and ‘Peano’ is used as a shorthand for the two-dimensional variety as well as the specific curve and method of construction that he developed.

The code I wrote to generate these fields uses a stage in one version of the curve’s construction to define a set of tiles, much like Munari’s own renditions do, with rules governing the number, generation, and application of colors in continuous tiles. The specific configuration of the colors in any given panel is generated randomly.

Made in Python with DrawBot.