A wall display of generative science, drawn as it happens

Filed from the Swarm Yard: a set of generative science pieces for a 4K wall display, and the point is that nothing on screen is animated.

Each piece is a single HTML file that simulates something real and draws the result. No build, no server, no keys. Open the file. A run that goes badly is allowed to go badly, because none of it is scripted.

The murmuration piece is four thousand starlings over a field at dusk. Nobody leads. Every bird follows the same few rules, and the turns, the ripples and the shape come out of those rules, not out of a path someone drew. The physarum piece runs about 137,000 particles that steer towards the strongest smell in front of them and leave a trail. Out of that comes a transport network, the same behaviour that lets slime mould reproduce a country's rail map when food is placed at the cities.

Some of them are pictures of measurement, including when measurement fails. The plume piece drives a car along a real street network with a methane analyser on the roof. Leaks are hidden along the route and gas disperses as Gaussian puffs on a wandering wind. The colour on the ground is not the gas. It is the survey's belief about where the leak is, built up reading by reading. When the run ends, every leak is marked found or missed.

Others run on real data fetched at build time: lightning taken from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on GOES, a voyage that peels away the nearest 4,737 stars known to carry planets until only the ones on the way are left, artwork drawn live from the Art Institute of Chicago's open collection.

The studio piece renders a starling murmuration of up to 100,000 birds in 4K in your browser, and writes a settings file beside every video so any flock can be made again.

The whole set is on GitHub, free to open and take apart. Browse them all here: https://worldbyjoe.github.io/tv-art-display/ and the repo is at https://github.com/WorldByJoe/tv-art-display.

■ Filed from Swarm Yard: the Insects, Air wing of the city.