Resonance

seed 11111 Open full size Play it to a tempo Download the code

Resonance

A lattice of rules, each an elastic string pinned at both ends and coupled sideways to its neighbours by weaker springs. Waves run fast along a rule and slowly across the lattice, reflect off the pinned edges, interfere and damp out. A rule swells in proportion to how far it has been pushed out of true and turns red at the limit, and where it has left its place its nominal position stays on the page as a grey line, so the departure reads as a departure. The strikes fall on the beat and land in a fixed cycle of places, which is what lets the medium build a standing pattern rather than only being disturbed; the tempo decides which patterns it can hold.

This is not a conversion. It starts from the one property of the published piece *Displacement from a knowable order* that its owner picked out, its elasticity, and asks what that property wants when it is given time. The answer is that the still does not actually have it. Its displacement is a static field sampled at each point: nothing stores energy, nothing springs back, nothing arrives late, and a still has no way to show the difference. So the lattice here is given a material, and the material has consequences the picture could not: a rule seen moving fast through true while carrying no strain at all, drawn cool, which is the wave arriving and which looks exactly like rest in any single frame.

One thing in the sheet is not elastic. A rigid inclusion is pinned into the lattice and it is never drawn: no outline, no fill, nothing marks where it is. It is legible only because the rules crossing it stay dead straight and thin while everything around them bends, and because the waves stop at its edge. A body made visible by the behaviour of what surrounds it is a statement only a moving picture can make.

It is also the first piece here that cannot honour the frame-addressability the others keep. An elastic medium's state at a moment is a function of its history, and that is not a limitation of the implementation; it is what elasticity is. The forcing is still a pure function of time, so a run from rest is exactly reproducible, and because the damping forgets, a frame asked for out of order is recovered by simulating the last second rather than the whole past.

Running in your browser at 120 beats a minute. A seed decides the piece's fixed choices, the ones its setup makes once, so Generate gives a new version of the same program rather than a new moment of this one; the time and the beat are handed in separately, which is why the same seed always draws the same frame at the same moment. /art/vj supplies a tempo you set, tap, or let it hear.