Ofshadow, a surface that thinks in light

There is no image file behind this. The plate, the holes, the light that falls into them from the upper left: all of it is a few hundred lines of code, and every frame is calculated the moment you look at it.

Why holes

A hole is the simplest thing a surface can do. It is either there or it is not, and if it is there, light decides how deep it looks. Give a grid of holes a rule for their depth and the surface starts to behave like a material: press a finger on it and the holes give way, take the finger off and they rise again.

One plate, seven behaviours

The same grid runs seven patterns. A spiral that winds from the centre. A swirl that turns the whole plate. Ripples, as if something had been dropped into it. A wave that rolls through. Noise, so it looks like weather. A text mode that presses a word into the surface. And a clock: the holes sink where the hands would be, so the plate tells the time without a single digit on it.

Grid, hole size, tempo and the angle of the light are sliders. Nothing else. That is the part I find exciting: a thing you would have to build once out of aluminium, and then live with, becomes a thing you can rewrite in an afternoon.

What it is for

Right now, nothing. It is a study in how much a small amount of code can carry when the rules are good. But it is not hard to imagine it as a lobby wall, a screensaver for a studio, or the loading state of a product that has the patience to be beautiful for three seconds.

Made with a canvas, a light vector and a lot of stubbornness about how a shadow falls.