NEXUS

Eight engines, one field

Eight completely different things to do with three thousand points.

Nothing loads when you change engine. Every mode owns the same particle array and is simply given permission to move it — which is why switching is instant, and why the density dial changes all eight at once. Press a card to run it.

Keys

Everything has a key.

How it is drawn

The paper edition is not a light frame around a black box.

A field of dim particles glows where it overlaps because the canvas is told to add light rather than paint over it. That is a dark-ground trick and only a dark-ground trick: on white, adding light does nothing at all, because white plus anything is still white.

So the paper edition composites the other way — overlaps darken instead of brightening — and every colour ramp in the engine runs backwards with it. Energy makes a particle brighter on the dark edition and darker on paper, because ink is the opposite of light. The trail behind a moving point is the ground colour painted back over the frame at a low opacity, which is why it is white here and near-black there rather than always black.

The drone is five sine waves through one filter that the cursor sweeps, and it retunes for every engine — eight fields that all sound identical would be a worse claim than eight fields that stay silent.