PROJECT 06 / 2026 / IN DEVELOPMENT / NYC
Convergent Grammar
A computational study of latent visual grammar across portraiture and adjacent image regimes.
01 / QUESTION
Do images share a grammar?
Convergent Grammar began with a narrow question about portraiture. Across centuries and cultures, across media, do painted portraits share an underlying spatial grammar, a set of compositional rules that show up regardless of artist, period, or style?
The question expanded quickly. If a grammar exists for portraits, what about landscapes, interiors, or garments? What about photographs? What about images generated by machines? The project now runs across modes of image making, looking for compositional structure that survives translation between them.
PORTRAIT / EXTRACTED GRAMMAR EXAMPLE
02 / METHOD
A pipeline for reading images as structure.
The pipeline ingests images from open collections, classifies each by genre, and extracts a spatial grammar, the geometric relationships between figures, horizons, focal points, and negative space. Grammars are stored as vector primitives and compared across the corpus.
The project’s finding so far: compositional grammar is shaped by the spatial problem a genre was built to solve, not by subject matter. A portrait grammar and a landscape grammar diverge because they answer different questions. A portrait grammar and a figure-study grammar converge because they answer the same one.
PORTRAIT STUDIES
Each plate pairs a source portrait with the spatial grammar extracted from it — the geometric relationships between figure, ground, focal point, and negative space, held apart from subject and style.
03 / SCOPE
Portraits first, then outward.
Portraiture is the spine of the study. It is the most densely sampled genre and the reference grammar every other scan is measured against — a corpus deep enough that convergence and divergence can be told apart rather than guessed at.
From there the work widens in two directions. Into other image types: landscapes, interiors, garments, and figure studies. And into other data sources beyond open museum collections — photographic archives, contemporary image libraries, and machine-generated imagery. Each new source is a test of whether portrait grammar survives a change of regime.
The project is in its research phase. Outputs will be released as diagrams and, eventually, as a paper on the vertical longitudinal study.
