About & how it works

What generative art is

Generative art is art you describe rather than draw. Instead of placing every pixel by hand, you write a short set of rules — an angle to turn by, a way for particles to move, a branch that splits into two — and let the computer follow them. Small rules, repeated thousands of times, produce structure far richer than anyone would draw directly: spirals, forests, waves, rain.

Because a little randomness is folded in, the output is never quite the same twice. Each of the eight pieces here is one such rule set, running forever and never repeating.

How a canvas animation works

Every piece is drawn on an HTML5 canvas — a blank rectangle you can paint on from JavaScript. Animation comes from a loop built on requestAnimationFrame, the browser’s way of saying “I’m about to paint the next frame, do your drawing now.” Roughly sixty times a second the code nudges every point forward a step and redraws it, which your eye reads as smooth motion.

Two small techniques do most of the visual work. First, several pieces never fully clear the screen — they paint a nearly-transparent panel over the last frame, so moving points leave a soft, fading trail instead of a hard dot. Second, the canvas is scaled to the device’s pixel ratio, so the lines stay crisp on a phone’s retina display as well as a monitor. That is the entire engine: a loop, some math, and a fade.

The eight algorithms

Each plate is one idea. Open any of them to watch it full-frame and read what drives it:

• 01Quantum Fibonaccigolden-ratio
• 02Bitcoin Matrixdigital-rain
• 03Cosmic Circlesorbital
• 04Spiral Waveslog-spiral
• 05Particle Burstparticle-system
• 06Geometric Flowharmonic
• 07Color Symphonywaveform
• 08Fractal DreamsL-system

Built to be light and honest

The whole site is a few hundred lines of vanilla JavaScript — no React, no canvas library, no analytics-heavy trackers. Pages are plain static HTML with clean URLs, the fonts are bundled with the site rather than pulled from a third party, and everything is cached for offline use as a Progressive Web App.

The only thing we measure is anonymous, cookieless page counts through GoatCounter, so we can tell which pieces people like. No accounts, no personal data, no cross-site tracking. That’s it.