OBSERVATION 035
Press the picture to reduce the points.40,000 → 625 → 40 → 1. Restore at any step.
At fewer points, dots grow and trails linger to help you follow their paths.
“Listen” maps the displayed points to sound.Changing the count rebuilds the sound.
One large body swims slowly.
The body is not drawn.
What is placed there are the spots along its back, and five raised ridges.
The arrangement of spots differs from one individual to the next.
People tell them apart, one by one in the sea, by this pattern.
As the equation of this work has a fingerprint, this one has its spots.
A bend born at the head passes slowly toward the tail.
The tail fin swings last and widest.
One stroke takes twenty seconds.
Reduce the points and the arrangement of spots survives for a while.
The pattern lives in the spacing of the points, not in their density.
At forty points the arrangement can no longer be read.
At one, what is left is the path of a point that was one spot, somewhere on the body.
The size was never inside any one point.
Fingerprint of this equation
sha256:3ea03dbae83de07ec0c31b9cb613c931aaf3580a6edf7d9ca3c5c0ca3f22c2d4
The same point number and time give the same coordinates.
Trails and the appearance of points depend on rendering settings and the device.
The button above takes the equation out as it is. To count it again yourself:
pbpaste > f.txt && printf %s "$(cat f.txt)" | shasum -a 256
Take it and run it.What appears when you change the equation? Run and rewrite this equation →