keep returning to a narrow constraint that turns out to be productive: the program must be deterministic, so that a style plus a seed reproduces a frame exactly, and it must run locally with no service behind it. Determinism sounds like a technical detail and is actually an aesthetic one, because it turns wandering into navigation. You can go back.
All three run in a browser or from a single directory. None is intended as a product.
The Work
ClipForge
Active
A local generative video studio: fourteen styles, seed-deterministic, exports MP4.
Nine of the styles are GLSL fragment shaders, one is a Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion simulation, and four are particle systems. It takes an image or video reference, pulls a palette off it, and renders offline frame by frame rather than capturing the canvas in real time, which is what makes the output reproducible from style and seed alone. Export is MP4 through WebCodecs.
What existsRuns from a single file with no build step and no server. Fourteen styles verified present in the source. There are no sample renders saved anywhere, so anything shown here has to be generated fresh.
Mycoschism
Archived
A cellular automaton whose rulesets mutate as it runs.
A small piece written as much for its own field-note voice as for the automaton, with named payload classes and a deliberately clinical register describing what are essentially blooms of coloured cells. It is complete and I am not going to add to it.
What existsFour files, no dependencies, runs by opening it. Small, finished, and embeddable as is.
FlipFlow Studio
Dormant
A reversible, deterministic flow computer modelled on an oil-and-water timer.
The origin is a two-colour oil timer at the Shedd Aquarium. The question was whether the thing that makes it satisfying, which is that it is perfectly reversible and its whole state is visible at once, could be made into a computational model rather than an animation of one.
What existsA monorepo with the engine, renderer and sigil packages split apart and a studio app on top. It has been built at least once. Unlike the other two it needs an install and a dev server, so it is the least likely of the three to be shown here directly.
keep returning to a narrow constraint that turns out to be productive: the program must be deterministic, so that a style plus a seed reproduces a frame exactly, and it must run locally with no service behind it. Determinism sounds like a technical detail and is actually an aesthetic one, because it turns wandering into navigation. You can go back.
