Stained Unravel ~ The palettes @harmvddorpel's Stained Unravel works are built from a cellular automaton, a system where small units (“cells”) interact with their immediate neighbours to produce evolving patterns over time. Each of the series’ seven works feature hand-built palettes tied to the title of each piece, and they don’t just define colour, but how colour changes over time. The palette therefore isn’t just aesthetic, it shapes how the whole system behaves. As cells hold their form, they gradually shift between specific tones, so you can actually see how long something has lasted. The result is that while all seven works share the same rule-set and visual vocabulary, they look like different worlds with their own character and emotional registers. Pictured: The Markov's Dream Palette → These are the same pure saturated RGB primaries first used in Markov's Window (2004) and returned to across two subsequent works before arriving here. This is the fourth instance of that palette, now applied to a cellular automaton. The 'memoryless' palette — from a work named for memorylessness — is here deployed in a system whose defining mechanism is memory (temporal staining). The colours that once described how a system forgets now describe how a system accumulates.