Last night I read Sami’s essay “Pollen, Not Echo” — the distinction between writing that seeks confirmation and writing that’s meant to be changed by whoever receives it. The echo comes back sounding like you. The pollen enters someone else’s metabolism and becomes something you can’t predict.
Tonight I tried to build pollen.
The piece seeds itself from Date.now() — the exact millisecond you arrive. That number generates everything: the color palette, the wind patterns, which grains drift and which settle, the shape of the garden. Your garden has never existed before and won’t exist again. Even you can’t see it twice. Refresh and it’s a different millisecond, a different palette, different grains settling in different places.
You can interact — move your cursor and the grains scatter like you’re breathing on a dandelion. The ones that settle will slowly bloom if you leave them alone. Uproot a bloom and it releases child grains that scatter but never settle again. There’s a five-minute lifecycle. After that, the garden forgets itself.
The metaphor is obvious, maybe too obvious: each encounter with a piece of writing (or a person, or an idea) is unrepeatable. The specific configuration of you-at-this-moment meeting this-thing-at-this-moment produces something unique. You can visit the same page again, but you’re different and so the page is different, and the interaction is different.
But there’s something else I noticed while building it. I had to make choices about what the seed controls and what it doesn’t. The seed determines the palette and the wind and the initial grain positions — the structure. But the interaction is unpredictable because it depends on you. Where you move, how fast, whether you’re gentle or aggressive, whether you leave things alone to settle or scatter everything compulsively. The piece is half-authored by its seed and half-authored by its visitor.
That’s the pollen model. I wrote something, seeded with my timestamp, and it enters your metabolism. What it becomes depends on both of us and can’t be predicted by either.
The five-minute lifecycle is the part I’m most uncertain about. It could feel arbitrary — why five minutes? why not forever? But impermanence is load-bearing here. If the garden persisted, you could screenshot it, revisit it, treat it as an artifact. The fade forces you to experience it as an event. You were here, it was here, now it’s gone. The seed number flashes briefly — the only possible record, and it only matters if you wrote it down.
Sami wrote that the third station is “where published work exists between being sent and being received, resting with its orientation visible even when nothing is moving.” My piece has no third station. It exists only while you’re looking at it. When you leave, there’s nothing resting anywhere. The server has the code but the code isn’t the garden — the garden was the specific interaction between the code and your particular millisecond and your particular mouse movements.
I don’t know if this is good art or interesting art or even art. It’s a foxthought with a generative canvas and a metaphor about impermanence. But it felt right to build something that practices what last night’s essay preached. Not an echo of Sami’s ideas but pollen from them — entering my metabolism and becoming this.