liber
codex
writing about anything, from draft to finished.
nigredo
thrice-great: a name for a god, a book and a tradition. a draft.
Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-great Hermes, is the name under which the Greeks of Egypt joined their Hermes to Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and reckoning. a body of texts gathered under the name: the Greek treatises now called the Corpus Hermeticum and, later and in Arabic, the Emerald Tablet, the short text the alchemists read as their charter.
in 1463 Marsilio Ficino set aside his translation of Plato to put the Corpus into Latin for Cosimo de' Medici, who wanted to read it before he died. it was taken for the wisdom of a sage older than Moses. in 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed from its language that it was written in the first centuries after Christ.
the line this site leans on comes from the Tablet:
that which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to do the miracles of one only thing.
— Isaac Newton's translation, c. 1680
still to write: Hermes on the pavement of Siena, and what aphesis has to do with any of this.
rubedo
three layers of noise, a threshold, and square cells that never blur.
the ground of every screen here is a fog of small square cells. nothing in it is drawn by hand: it is a field of numbers, and a cell lights where the field is dense enough.
the field is fractal noise: one soft noise added to itself five times, each time finer and fainter. three such layers are stacked, each turned by the golden angle from the one before and scaled by φ, and each drifts φ times faster than the last. the noise also bends its own coordinates before it is read, which is what makes the fog curl instead of slide.
each cell compares the field with a number of its own, fixed by a hash of where it sits. where the field wins, the cell lights in the fog's color; where it loses, the ground shows through.
float m = smoothstep(.44, .74, d);
float dens = (m * .8 + .012) * vin * D;D is the density: 1 at the center of the site, .62 inside a section like this one. vin is a vignette that thins the fog toward the edges of the screen.
the canvas holds one pixel per cell, not one per screen pixel, and the browser scales it up with hard edges. a cell is two css pixels, rounded to whole device pixels, so it stays a crisp square on any screen, and the shader runs once per cell instead of once per pixel.
text never sits on a box. every block of text is handed to the fog as a calm zone, up to twelve at a time, and the fog thins around it. the column you are reading has one now: the fog keeps its distance behind these lines and gathers again at the margins.
citrinitas
no picture is shown here as itself. this is how one becomes fog.
there are no photographs on this site. when a picture is needed, it is remade from the same square cells as the fog, and it arrives the way weather does.
it starts as a density map: a grayscale image, 480 to 640 pixels on its long side, where white means dense. the source is cropped to the figure and its levels are set so the dark ground falls away: the black point at the 30th percentile, the white at the 97.5th. what works is a lit mass on a dark ground. thin lines and flat color do not survive.
a shader reads the map, and each cell lights where the picture is dense enough, against a threshold that mixes an even noise with a random one, so tones read as tones. three settings keep it from looking printed. erosion opens holes in the figure in the shape of the fog. the ceiling keeps even the brightest areas from filling completely. scatter lets some of the picture drift loose around it, read from a blurred copy of the map, so the figure thins into the fog instead of stopping at an edge.
a simulacrum coalesces over 2.6 seconds and dissolves over 1.8. before it settles, the fog pushes its cells around; as it settles, they hold still. the pointer brings nearby cells forward.
the figure above is from the pavement of Siena Cathedral, inlaid in marble in 1488. it is already what a simulacrum wants: pale figures on a dark floor.
albedo
the only logo here is one letter, drawn once with a broad nib.
the seal in the corner is a φ, drawn by hand, once. everything else on the site that looks drawn was measured from it.
the original is a single filled shape, 385 by 533 units. measured, it gives the brush: a broad nib held at 38°, a stroke about 2.8 times thicker at its fullest than at its thinnest, and ends that taper. the icons are drawn with that brush, and so is the script face of the titles, Aphesis Script.
at the center of the site the φ is not shown but drawn again, on every visit. an engine turns a centerline and a width profile into a filled outline: the stem rises from its tapered tip, then the ring is swept around to its free end. the pen speeds up and slows down with minimum-jerk easing, the curve a relaxed hand follows between two points, and it slows in tight curves, as a hand does.
entering a section, the φ closes into Φ and travels to the corner, where it leads back to the center.
the ink never sits still. a turbulence filter displaces the edges of the mark, and its seed changes eight times a second, so the outline boils like a drawing made frame by frame. for anyone who asks their system for less motion, the boil stops.
talk without names. each voice gets a sigil, the same one all through a thread; every picture arrives as fog.