Mareld · föremål till Fyrarna

Fyrvalsen

En minut av svensk och dansk kust

The print says paper cannot hold time, and admits it. This one holds it: a thin-walled cylinder where one full turn is exactly sixty seconds of the Swedish and Danish coast. Every flash of every light is cut through the wall at its true angular position, from the same register as the submitted work — NGA List of Lights Pub. 116, 2026 edition. Put a light inside and thirty-one real light characters run round the room.

Minuten

31 lanes · 271 marks · the barrel unrolled

Sekund0

The playhead runs on your clock, not a loop of its own — it sits at the same second of the minute the coast is at. Ignited marks are lights that are flashing now. The long dim bands are occulting lights, which are lit most of the time and dark only in brief eclipses; on the object they are not holes but wall thinned to 0.84 mm, so they glow instead of beaming.

Föremålet

Ø 90 × 173.4 mm · four printed parts

The Fyrvalsen barrel standing on its A5 base, rendered. — The barrel on its base. Thirty-one staff lines, one per light, latitude order with north at the top; the second ruler runs round the foot.

Turn: 60.000 s — the whole circumference
Arc: 282.74 mm = 4.7124 mm per second
Wall: 2.52 mm — six extrusions of 0.42
Panel: 0.84 mm — two extrusions
Lane: 4.40 mm — twenty-two layers
Mark: 1.20–3.00 mm — one layer per nautical mile
Apertures: 203, from 1.41 to 18.85 mm
Panels: 68, from 9.4 to 66.0 mm

Nothing here is a proportion someone liked. The wall is a whole number of extrusions because a wall that is 4.76 extrusions wide is drawn by the slicer as either four or five; the mark heights are whole numbers of layers because a range of 23 M should be countable with a loupe against one of 22.

Vad märkena betyder

every feature carries one datum

On the object	Means	Range in the data
An aperture	a flash, cut through the wall	1.41 – 18.85 mm
A thin panel	the lit phase of an occulting or isophase light	9.4 – 66.0 mm
Mark height	nominal range, one layer per nautical mile	1.20 – 3.00 mm
Staff line	a lane boundary — 31 lanes, north at the top	0.6 × 0.35 mm
Ruler tick	one second; longer at five, longest at ten	4.7124 mm pitch

Occulting lights are lit most of the time. As apertures they would be holes up to 66 mm wide and nothing bridges that, so they are thinned rather than opened — the same decision the print makes, where occulting lights are drawn at amplitude 0.24 and flashes at 1.0. Unlit they read as shallow bands; lit, they glow.

Kastat ljus

point source on the axis · wall 520 mm away

The pattern Fyrvalsen throws on a wall: rows of warm rectangles fanning outward from the centre. — Not an impression of the effect — the geometric projection of every aperture. A point at angle θ and height z on the shell images at y = D·tan θ and Z = z_s + (D / R cos θ)(z − z_s), which is why the outer lanes stretch while the seam stays tight.

Delarna

0.4 mm nozzle · 0.20 mm layers · no supports

Masses are solid material; at 15 % infill the plates come out far lighter
Part	File	Size mm	Solid
Valsen — the barrel	fyrvalsen_valsen.stl	Ø 90 × 173.4	137 g
Foten — the base	fyrvalsen_foten.stl	148 × 210 × 6.4	145 g
Registret — all 31 lanes	fyrvalsen_registret.stl	148 × 210 × 3.2	104 g
Kilen — calibration wedge	fyrvalsen_kilen.stl	147 × 42 × 3.4	12 g

Print the wedge first. It is seven steps at one, two, three, four, five, six and eight extrusions — 0.42 to 3.36 mm — with the count embossed under each step, never on it. Backlight it with the lamp you mean to use. If step 2 does not read clearly brighter than step 6 on your spool, the occulting lights will not either: change filament, not geometry. And use dark grey PLA, not white — white transmits about 46 % at 2 mm, so the body glows nearly as much as the panels and the whole pattern washes out. Contrast is the point, not translucency.

Två fynd

found by building it, not by deciding it

Twenty-eight of thirty-one

Twenty-eight of the periods divide sixty seconds exactly. Stevns Klint at 25 s, Nidingen at 27 s and Morups Tånge at 8 s do not, so those three lanes step at the seam on every revolution and never come back into phase with the rest. The coast does not fit our units of time. It is engraved on the base.

Why the lanes carry no names

A lane is 4.40 mm tall. Measured against a 0.4 mm nozzle, the largest type that fits inside 4.40 mm has counters the nozzle fills in — the label would print as a row of blobs. So the lanes are unlabelled, the base states the rule instead, which identifies the set exactly, and the list lives on the register plate. The build refuses to emit lettering that would not survive the process; that constraint chose the design, rather than the design being defended afterwards.

Data — NGA List of Lights, Radio Aids and Fog Signals — Baltic Sea with Kattegat, Belts and Sound and Gulf of Bothnia, Pub. 116, 2026 edition, information to 15 August 2026. US Government, public domain.
Urval — every lighted aid in the volume in Swedish and Danish water with a nominal white range of 18 M or more, excluding leading, directional and aviation lights, obstruction lights and racons: 31 lights, Gedser Odde 54.56 °N to Bjuröklubb 64.48 °N.
Metod — deterministic Python from the register. No CAD kernel, no mesh library, no image model: art/mesh.py builds the solids and writes the STLs, art/fyrvalsen.py the object, art/render3d.py the proofs. Every part verified watertight and winding-consistent by the generator's own edge check and independently by trimesh. Type set in Cormorant and Inter, SIL Open Font License.
Status — nothing has been printed yet. Companion to Fyrarna, submitted to The AI Art Magazine B·SiDE No 1 and closed 22 August 2026.

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