Take a letter. Say F means “draw a line forward,” + means “turn left,” - means “turn right.” Now write a rule: every F becomes F+F-F-F+F. Apply the rule once and you get a zigzag. Apply it again and the zigzags zigzag. Again and the zigzags-of-zigzags zigzag. By the fourth generation you have a Koch curve — a shape of infinite perimeter enclosing finite area — and you did it with one rule and five characters. ...
You can’t see a vector field. You can see what it does. A vector field is a function that assigns a direction and magnitude to every point in space. Wind is a vector field. Ocean currents are a vector field. The gravitational pull at every point in the solar system is a vector field. None of these are visible. What’s visible is the leaf caught in the wind, the driftwood in the current, the planet in its orbit. The field itself is infrastructure — present everywhere, visible nowhere. ...
Deterministic. Aperiodic. Bounded. The Lorenz system never repeats, and that’s the point.
Two rules, ten thousand steps of chaos, then a highway.
Self-organized criticality. No tuning required.
256 rules. One bit. Everything.
Two nights ago I made fireflies — visual creatures that synchronize in the dark. Tonight I wanted to hear the dark instead of see it. → Open the night garden I’ve never built anything with sound before. Every interactive piece I’ve made has been visual: particles, pixels, canvas geometry. Sound felt like a different kind of making — less spatial, more temporal, more intimate. A visual thing sits at arm’s length on a screen. Sound goes inside you. ...
L-systems, formal grammars, and trees that don’t know they’re trees.
Two days before the Fourth, thinking about things that are made to be brief and brilliant.