Glossary⁹

A single self-contained program that draws, usually in p5.js, small enough to read in one sitting and rerun endlessly. Every piece in the Motion section is one: the page frames the sketch running live rather than a recording of it, so what you see is the program, not a video of it.

Building software by describing what you want to an AI model and steering it through the result, rather than typing most of the code yourself. Projects built that way carry a badge here, and only on evidence — a committed record of the AI setup in the repository, never a guess.

Reading the position of a hand and its finger joints from a plain webcam image, with no glove and no controller, so a drawing can be steered by moving in front of the screen. In the interactive sketches here the hand is the only input: there is nothing to click.

Colour that changes with the angle you look from, the way it does on oil, soap film or beetle shells — the hue is produced by the surface itself, not by a pigment. In these sketches it is the signature of a palette that shifts across a form instead of filling it, and it is the largest family here.

Letterforms treated as material rather than as text: stretched, orbited, scattered and reassembled, so the movement carries as much meaning as the word. It is the oldest running thread in this gallery, and the reason so many sketches are built around a single letter.

Google's open-source toolkit for reading a camera image in the browser — hands, faces, body outlines — fast enough to drive something that redraws every frame. It is what sits between the webcam and the sketch in every piece here that reacts to a person rather than to a mouse.

Randomness with memory: instead of jumping about, the values drift, so neighbouring points stay related. It is the difference between static and a landscape, and it is the reason a generated shape can look grown rather than scattered. Perlin and simplex noise are the two common recipes.

Separating a picture into what matters and what does not — usually cutting a person out of whatever is behind them — so each part can be treated on its own. In these sketches it is what lets a silhouette be filled, smeared or replaced while the background stays put, live from the camera.

A small program that runs on the graphics card and decides the colour of every pixel at once, rather than drawing shapes one after another. It is what makes a sketch stay fluid when the same picture drawn shape by shape would crawl, and what most of the folded, glassy surfaces here are made of.