Blurart · radius sweep · 2026
The same field of eye-chart letters, solved forty-six times over — once for every amount of blur. Each print is built so that one specific defocus turns it back into letters. Dial the radius and watch which print is required.
Nothing in the left-hand image is a letter. It is speckle, solved pixel by pixel so that blurring it reconstructs the letter field. Blur throws away high spatial frequencies; the solver hides everything it needs in the frequencies that survive.
Red, green and blue are solved as three independent problems from slightly different starting noise. Where they disagree you get colour; where they agree the letters emerge. Under blur the disagreement averages out, so a vivid print resolves to neutral black on white.
Every sixty steps the solver blurs its own working image, compounding fine speckle into coarse marbled swirl. Graining runs to 95% of the run — stop earlier and the clean polish that follows sands the swirl away.
Correlation falls from 0.998 at radius 1 to 0.79 at radius 46. More blur destroys more information, so there is less of the letter field left to rebuild. The curve you drag along is that limit, measured.
The prints are served at their native 1280×720 and the effect is real only near 1:1. Zoom the page, or view it on a narrow screen, and the browser's rescaling folds the speckle into moiré rings that are not in the artwork. The radius is in printed pixels, so it scales with the print.
Optotypes set in Snellen; labels in Optician Sans. Each radius warm-starts from its neighbour, one step at a time, out from radius 16.