Pencil of Nature

PN.26.001. Art. Studio project, 2026.

Impossible Rooms

Five surreal interiors and landscapes, each rendered for thousands of light paths per pixel.

A door standing on a salt flat at dusk, with night sky through its frame.
Door, Salt Flat
A green panelled room whose floor is the sea, with a single chair standing on the water.
Room With Sea Floor
A pink arcaded stair descending into turquoise water beside a gold sphere.
The Drowned Stair
A pear on a pewter plate and a glass sphere on a dark table, with a small ringed planet hovering above.
Still Life With Planet
A concrete chamber with one line of sun, a stone sphere and a door of light.
Slot

The brief

Produce a surrealist series with strong art direction, using nothing but code.

The idea

A photograph can only lie about the world, while a renderer can lie with the world. Each of these images contains one impossible fact, and then behaves with complete physical honesty about it. The chair stands on the sea. The reflection agrees.

Decisions

  • One impossible thing per picture, and everything else plausible.
  • Colour stays dusty and quiet, so the images feel remembered rather than designed.
  • Each scene is under a hundred lines of code.
  • Finals run for up to 7,000 samples per pixel.

How it came together

  1. Wrote each scene as distance functions, then tuned light at low samples.
  2. Fixed cameras buried inside geometry and rooms with no way for light to enter.
  3. Rendered finals on the GPU for 40 seconds to 15 minutes each.

How it works

Each scene is written as distance functions and rendered by the same path tracer as Slow Light.

Want something like this?

Tell us what you are making. A few lines is enough to start.

Tell us about your project

Hanging nearby

Receding misty ridges under a pale sun.Seven WeathersSeven algorithms, one climate. Drizzle is falling strokes, Anticyclone is contour lines, Hard Frost is one rule about sixty degrees.PN.26.018. Print series, Interactive viewer.A freestanding door on a salt flat at dusk, with night visible through it.Slow LightA real path tracer running in your browser. The picture starts as noise and keeps getting truer for as long as you stay.PN.26.014. Interactive renderer.A container ship shedding containers into a heavy sea.Tide TablesSix editorial illustrations printed on a risograph press that exists only as code.PN.26.005. Illustration series, Print process code.