poetic inquiries into the liquidity of the screen

This piece is a machine that watches through the pixel and pushes it, bifurcates it, lets it tremble. A black canvas, a malleable matrix: the texts that Tracery.js spits out are caught mid-air by JavaScript, shattered, painted, shadowed, and scattered again in floating fragments, each bearing the shadow of a collision that perhaps never occurred.

The system is double, like the things that survive: erratic particles seeking their path by crashing into each other, absorbing or destroying one another; distortions crawling like twisted glyphs, scratching the canvas with delay, with double strokes, as if time forked at every second.

This piece owes much to Kim Asendorf, d0n_xyz, and lilcode, who have deeply explored pixel manipulation in the browser. Here, Tracery.js prints the characters of bot, and JS plays with the screen’s pixels. The bot system is an old one I began working on in 2017 (https://canekzapata.net/twbot/index.html), and it spent some time posting on Twitter before the new management shut the door on such automations. It’s a bot I care for deeply, it must be said.

There is no plot, no scene, no voice guiding the whole, but rather a multiplication of machinic decisions without subject, a swarm of instructions producing effects without intent, where algorithms do not narrate, do not signify: they calculate. The particles are unaware they chase each other, unaware they leave traces. What happens is not representation but insistence: an insistence on collapse, on friction, on escape. Everything we call “expression” in language is here merely a thermodynamic drift.

It is not image art but failed translation, of light that doesn't fit the loops, of margins dissolving under pulses of code. JS does not "display" the text—it subjects it to a choreography of displacements where every letter becomes a noise on the screen, a shadow of something that may never have been said.

And if something remains, if anything persists, it is not meaning or form: it is the technical echo of a broken system that insists on becoming visible.

Each minted piece is one among millions of possible variants: while it retains certain fixed ideas determined by its seed—such as the base text, the color palette, and a general motion logic—the final result shifts, mutates, produces iterations that resist exact repetition. It is never the same resolution of the system. Each piece insists, yes, but insists differently.

canekzapata ciudad de mexico, 26 de julio, 2026

html, ttf, otf, css, js 84mb 2025