Reform

The monogram, printed in liquid ink. Drag through it and the ink shears, curls and bleeds across the page, trailing a thin ultramarine wake.

Stop, and after a moment the ink starts back. The smears thin out and the mark re-inks in place until it is sharp again.

The name is a switch: off, then form. We wanted a piece where the visitor knocks the brand out of shape and it restores itself without being asked. It's a small argument that a strong system can take a lot of handling.

It is also a toy people keep playing with, which counts for something.

1. 1

   A stable-fluids solver runs entirely on the GPU in WebGL2: semi-Lagrangian advection, vorticity confinement to keep the curls tight, and twenty Jacobi iterations of pressure projection per frame to keep the flow incompressible. Velocity lives on a coarse grid 128 cells tall; the ink on a much finer one.

2. 2

   Ink and wake share one half-float texture. Red carries the ink and green carries the accent trail, which fades within a couple of seconds.

3. 3

   The memory is one extra pass. The monogram is rasterised into a mask texture, and every frame the ink channel is blended toward it: barely at all while you stir, then faster once you've been still for a moment.

4. 4

   The display pass pushes the ink through a tight threshold, so edges stay crisp like print rather than soft like smoke, and adds a trace of noise to stop banding.

5. 5

   Left alone, an occasional gust keeps it moving. Under reduced motion there are no gusts. The ink only moves when you move it, and the simulation stops once it has had time to settle.