(00) Playground

Playground

A sketchbook of experiments made with AI as a collaborator: forty-two studies in motion, color, space and time, twelve small games after the arcade classics of the 1980s, and one long piece about how a single number grows a flower.

Pieces: 55
Notes: A long read for each
Sound: Web Audio, optional
Video files: 0

F.01 · Phyllotaxis · one number

Golden Angle

Place each seed a fixed turn from the last. Every simple fraction leaves gaps; one irrational turn leaves none, and grows a flower, and then a meadow.

IA turn
IIClose is not enough
IIIThe golden angle
IVBloom
VWind
VIBegin again

1 min 40 s · best with sound

(02) Motion

Motion studies

Twelve short pieces, each on its own idea. Five look at how machine learning works (attention, diffusion, training, optimization, embeddings); the rest are mathematics, nature and type.

M.01Transformers · self-attention

Attention

Four attention heads read one sentence, every arc weighted by a real softmax, until “it” finds the trophy and all four fire at once.

M.02Generative models · denoising

Diffusion

Two thousand particles of noise, denoised over a thousand steps of a cosine schedule with an ideal denoiser, until a drawing appears.

M.03A network trains live

Learning

A 205-parameter neural network trains in your browser as you watch, bending its boundary around spirals, circles, moons and XOR.

M.04Curl noise · advection

Flow field

Three thousand particles ride curl noise and comb hairlines into silk. Every ten seconds the page turns to a new kind of flow; drag to stir it.

M.05Chaos · sensitive dependence

Attractor

A hundred and twenty paths launched a millionth apart through the Lorenz, Aizawa and Halvorsen attractors, diverging until they fill each one.

M.06Typography in motion

Kinetic type

Forty-four beats at 120 BPM: masked reveals, glyphs rising from the baseline, outline echoes, a type specimen and a grid.

M.07Optimization · gradient descent

Descent

SGD, Momentum and Adam race down a loss landscape drawn as a topographic map. Not all of them find the bottom.

M.08Embeddings · k-means

Latent space

A thousand word embeddings cluster under live k-means, answer a nearest-neighbour query, then do arithmetic: heron − water + sky ≈ swift.

M.09Flocking · emergence

Murmuration

Two and a half thousand birds and three rules fold into dark sheets over a reed bed. A falcon stoops, and the alarm ripples out.

M.10Fourier series

Epicycles

Up to 128 circles riding circles redraw the ZB monogram, a treble clef, a heron and a profile, doubling the terms each pass.

M.11Waves · interference

Ripple tank

Point sources in a ripple tank, drawn as contour hairlines. Nodal lines sweep through a beat, then a third source breaks them apart.

M.12Cellular automata

Automata

Rules 90, 184, 110 and 30 print like woven cloth, from order to chaos, until the last row seeds the Game of Life.

(03) Color

Studies in color

From the physics of light to the biology of the eye and the history of pigment. Here color is the subject, so it is allowed to be everything it is, computed from the science rather than chosen.

C.01Newton’s prism · dispersion

Spectrum

Every ray traced through real flint glass: white light fans into colors, one color stays one color, and an inverted prism makes white.

C.02Rayleigh scattering · a day

Blue hour

A day over a quiet hill in 78 seconds, its sky computed from Rayleigh and Mie scattering and ozone, through the blue hour to the first star.

C.03Negative afterimages · your own eye

Afterimage

Hold your gaze on a cross while saturated colors tire your cones; then a plain gray drawing fills with color that is not on screen.

C.04Additive and subtractive mixing

Light and ink

Three lights add up to white; three inks take away to black. Then one apple, as screen subpixels and as print rosettes under a loupe.

C.05Simultaneous contrast · after Albers

Interaction

Four moving plates after Josef Albers: one color seen as two, two seen as one, a red changed by its lines, squares breathing in OKLCH.

C.06Thin-film interference

Soap film

A soap film’s true interference colors, computed from its thickness, drain and swirl to silver, then black, and then it bursts.

C.07Bioluminescence · surf

Sea glow

A moonless shore where breaking waves glow blue: thousands of single cells flash when the surf, or your hand, disturbs them.

C.08Planck’s law · star colors

Blackbody

A filament heats from 1,000 to 30,000 K as Planck’s curves draw on, then 1,500 stars sort themselves into the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram.

C.09A history of pigments

Pigments

Sixteen pigments, from Blombos ochre to YInMn blue, poured grain by grain into a cabinet, each with its chemistry, story and price.

C.10Trichromacy · color-vision deficiency

Three cones

Real cone curves read each wavelength as three numbers; a metamer is solved live; one painted garden seen as four kinds of eye see it.

(04) Space

Studies in space

The orbits of planets and the bending of light, the scale of everything, the shape of a fourth dimension, and the way cells share a plane.

S.01Kepler’s laws · orbits

Equal areas

Kepler’s three laws from integrated orbits: equal-area petals, T² = a³ on a log plot, then an orrery you can throw worlds into.

S.02Powers of ten · after the Eameses

Scale

Two hands almost touching, then ten times farther each step: out to the edge of the observable universe and back in to a proton.

S.03General relativity · light

Event horizon

Light computed in Schwarzschild’s geometry bends, circles the photon sphere or falls in; then a disk lifts into view around a shadow.

S.04Cosmology · expansion

Redshift

Galaxies drift apart on an expanding grid, light reddens as space stretches, Hubble’s law assembles, and the oldest light glows.

S.05Perspective · light-time

Orion in depth

Seven stars make a hunter only from here: swing around them and they spread across a thousand light-years, lit in different centuries.

S.06Three bodies · Lagrange points

Lagrange

Sun and Jupiter’s landscape as a contour map: saddles spill, Trojans hold in tadpoles, Webb circles L2. Drag the mass past Routh’s limit.

S.07Hypercubes · projection · slices

Fourth dimension

A point slides into a line, a square, a cube, a tesseract: turned in four dimensions, sliced as in Flatland, unfolded into a cross.

S.08Voronoi · Lloyd relaxation

Territories

Every place goes to its nearest seed. Moved to their centroids, the seeds settle into a honeycomb; then wings, mud and foam.

S.09Gravitational waves · GW150914

Chirp

Two black holes spiral in on a rippling grid, the wave crosses 1.3 billion years to LIGO, and you hear the chirp.

S.10Earth’s rotation · patience

Star trails

A night-long exposure, computed: stars sweep arcs around the pole at 15° an hour, and the pole sinks or rises with your latitude.

(05) Time

Studies in time

Pendulums and clockwork, tides and tree rings, the arrow of entropy and the slow history of the Earth: the many ways the world keeps time.

T.01Pendulums · phase and beat

Pendulum wave

Fifteen pendulums tuned to 60–74 swings a minute fall out of step into waves and groups, then all agree again on the minute.

T.02Gravity · spring and neap

Tide

A lunar month at one shore: two tidal bulges, the Earth turning beneath them, and the Sun adding springs and neaps.

T.03Entropy · irreversibility

Arrow of time

A drop of ink spreads as its entropy climbs; the same film run backward unmixes it, and a box of gas shows why we never see that.

T.04Radioactive decay · dating

Half-life

No atom knows when it will decay, yet thousands keep perfect time: the same law dates a 4,000-year-old hearth and the Earth.

T.05Earth history · one year

Deep time

The Earth’s 4.54 billion years as one calendar year: life in March, dinosaurs in mid-December, all of writing in the last 36 seconds.

T.06Clockwork · Graham deadbeat

Escapement

A Graham deadbeat escapement simulated from its real pallet geometry: lock, impulse and drop, one tooth every two beats.

T.07Kuramoto · coupled oscillators

Synchrony

Fireflies with their own rhythms fall into step once coupling passes a critical value, and their scattered notes gather into a chord.

T.08Relativity · time dilation

Light clock

A clock made of light runs slow when it moves; twins age differently on a Minkowski diagram, and GPS corrects for both.

T.09Dendrochronology · cross-dating

Tree rings

A pine grows ring by ring through a simulated climate, is cored, and an undated beam slides into its true years.

T.10The equation of time

Analemma

The Sun at clock noon, once a day for a year, draws a figure eight: its height is the tilt, its width the equation of time.

(06) Arcade

Small games

Twelve games after the golden age of the arcade, 1978 to 1986, drawn in hairline. Each one runs an attract mode: a small bot plays until you take over.

G.01After Pac-Man · Namco, 1980

Pellets

A maze chase drawn as an architectural floor plan: four ghosts with four personalities, registration marks for power pellets.

G.02After Tetris · Alexey Pajitnov, 1984

Stack

Falling blocks in a section through a well, each piece its own hatched material. The demo bot weighs every placement.

G.03After Asteroids · Atari, 1979

Debris

A hairline dart in a field of drifting rock: inertia, wraparound and hyperspace. Every hit splits the problem in two.

G.04After Space Invaders · Taito, 1978

Formation

Fifty-five hairline invaders march to a four-note bass line that quickens as their ranks thin, toward bunkers that erode cell by cell.

G.05After Frogger · Konami, 1981

Crossing

Five lanes of traffic and a river of logs and diving turtles, drawn as a survey. The demo bot plans every hop ahead.

G.06After Lunar Lander · Atari, 1979

Touchdown

Set a drawn lander down on dimensioned pads over a topographic ridge. The camera closes in near the ground; narrow pads pay more.

G.07After Missile Command · Atari, 1980

Intercept

Six hairline skylines and three batteries. Interceptors bloom into hatched circles, and every catch sets off the next, a note higher.

G.08After Arkanoid · Taito, 1986

Rebound

A brick wall drawn as an elevation, every course hatched differently. Broken bricks scatter their hatching; rounds turn like pages.

G.09After Qix · Taito, 1981

Claim

Stake out land around a restless string sculpture. Each closed line becomes a numbered, hatched parcel on a cadastral plan.

G.10After Q*bert · Gottlieb, 1982

Pyramid

Twenty-eight hatched cubes in axonometric. Hop every top to its target while balls roll down and a coiled spring gives chase.

G.11After Centipede · Atari, 1981

Segments

A centipede of outlined ovals and paddling legs winds through hatched mushrooms, splitting wherever it is hit.

G.12After Tron · Bally Midway, 1982

Trace

Four light cycles lay walls across a drafting grid. Crashes derez into sparks, and the last line still drawing wins.