Perception, moving

One continuous field, rendered once but sampled at wildly different rates across the frame. A focal falloff gives each patch of the picture its own tile size, spanning a factor of sixteen from the attended region to the far edge, and every tile draws the same contour of the same field. The sharp region and the coarse region are provably the same material, one read far finer than the other. Coarse tiles are not empty: they carry a halftone screen of their own averaged tone, the sampling lattice made visible exactly where the field is under-sampled, and hatch where they resolve to a single flat value. Fine tiles carry a filigree quantised to thirty-two levels that the coarse field cannot hold.

Moving, the field drifts and the focus wanders, so the resolved zone travels across the picture and regions that were plates become filigree and then plates again. The band thresholds step with the beat while the terrain underneath slides continuously, which is the only place the two clocks are visibly different things.

The piece is handed the time and the beat rather than reading a clock, so any frame can be drawn on demand and the same inputs always draw the same picture. It renders into an offscreen buffer keyed on a quantised context, about twelve distinct pictures a second; that costs temporal resolution and not determinism. This is a reimplementation of the published still under the animation contract, not the original program with time added to it.