Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Black Hole is a wall-hung concave artwork made from a single line of light that spirals from the ground all the way to a central convex dome that houses an industrial camera. https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/black_hole.php
The piece is an extension of several lines of research that the artist’s studio has been exploring: a) interactive art that simultaneously uses and makes evident the mechanisms of surveillance, such as Surface Tension (1992) or Standards and Double Standards (2004); b) linear lights that carry information as a visible network, such as Less Than Three (2008), or Voice Array (2011); polar and even non-Euclidean topologies for data display, such as Pulse Spiral (2008) and Polar (2018); and digital portraiture such as Third Person (2006), Seismoscopes (2009), and A Crack in the Hourglass (2020).
Below is a curated list of precedents—artworks that came before the creation of Black Hole. This document is part of the studio’s practice of always crediting people, here is an early example for Amodal Suspension in 2003. Like previous lists of precedents, we encourage people to send us any missing entries, please contact us.
Almost four centuries ago, French artist Claude Mellan created the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, an engraving known as the first example of an entire image made with a single continuous spiral line, estimated to be about 150 metres long if “unwound”.
In a Christian apocryphal story, similar to that of the Shroud of Turin, the Sudarium was a sweat-cloth used by Saint Veronica to wipe Jesus' face on the road to Calvary, miraculously transferring and imprinting his image onto the fabric. Mellan placed an inscription at the bottom which draws a parallel between this divine miracle and his own art: "FORMATVR VNICVS VNA", which translates to "The unique one formed by a single line”.
Claude Mellan, Face of Christ, Sudarium of Saint Veronica, 1649
In more contemporary practice, Chuck Close used Mellan’s technique to make a portrait of Philip Glass, part of a prolific series of treatments on a single photographic portrait. Close challenged Magnolia Editions Director Donald Farnsworth: "Could the contemporary printmaking wizardry of Magnolia convincingly recreate the famed and apparently ‘inimitable’ technique of one of the great French engravers?”.
Chuck Close, Phil (Spiral), 2014
Among manual contemporaries of this technique are Singapore artist Chan Hwee Chong. Today, single line portraits are made by many methods, such as the Spiral Betty website, an STL/3mf generator, a TSP approach to provide continuous-line drawings, an iPhone app, an Android app, open source R and ggplot code, and even colouring books.
Shalanah Dawson, Spiral Betty, 2018
In 2025 Shanghainese artist Raven Kwok developed a double spiral which gradually assembled a webcam image along the path of the spiral. Watch the demonstration here to see the still image appear and then become disassembled along the spiral path.
Raven Kwok, unknown title*,* 2025.
At the start of the 20th Century, spiral photograms were made using objects to register on silver gelatin, or kinetic patterns representing time passing, with their development coinciding with the generalized acceptance of hypnosis by neurologists and psychologists such as Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud to uncover buried memories. The spectral quality of the resulting art was often related to the subconscious.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm, 1925
Man Ray, Rayograph Spiral, 1923
Marcel Duchamp, Anémic Cinéma, 1926
Edward W. Quigley, Vortex (detail), 1933
Julio Le Parc, Continuel Lumière cylindre, 1962