Swarming, moving

A radial armature: an off-centre focus just inside one edge, a fan of unequal angular sectors cut into unequal annular bands, crossed by curved strands so the fan reads as one swept body rather than a set of slices. Density falls with radius, so the material piles up where the fan converges and thins into a dark far field.

The still was titled Arrival, and the pile-up at the focus was always a set of tracks through a vortex field: agents, caught at one instant. Here they run. Each falls in toward the focus on its own phase and is replaced as it arrives, so the swarm is continuously mid-arrival rather than all leaving at once, and the field that steers them is the same field whose value decided which sector got a solid block, a stipple bin or a banded fill. The armature does not move, because it is the structure the swarm arrives into.

Every agent's whole track is integrated fresh from an anchor that is a function of the time alone, so no state carries from one frame to the next and the same inputs always draw the same picture.