Twenty-eight interactive studies in four series. The first hands a single sentence to ten physical laws. The second picks up Maeda's optical and generative work, where time, number, and light answer to your cursor. The third asks how that same sentence behaves under attention, repetition, and translation. The fourth turns it into something you play or watch run on its own.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.Each piece subjects the same nine words to a different law, so you read them through gravity, heat, momentum, and the rest. Move your cursor. The words push back.
Each word has mass equal to its letter count, and every word pulls on every other by the inverse-square law. Left alone, the heaviest words win and the sentence collapses into one dense knot.
Watch it fall together over a few seconds, then hit reset to stand the sentence back up.
Let it run all the way down and watch the order: the long words become the wells and reel the three-letter words in last. Reset a few times — the collapse takes a different path each run.
The cursor is a heat source. Letters near it warm up, glow, and shake. Hold too long and they gain enough energy to break loose and drift off, cooling in the air until they condense back into place.
Hover over the words to heat them, linger to make them sublimate, then pull away and watch them recondense.
Heat one letter, then lift away the instant it breaks free — it wanders, then darts back to its slot. Or sweep the whole line slowly to boil the sentence at once and watch it reassemble out of order before it settles.
A charge-and-fire toy built from the sentence. Dwelling on "fox" stores launch energy in a gauge. Spend it and "jumps" leaves the line as a projectile, arcing under gravity until it lands.
Rest the cursor on "fox" to fill the gauge, then click "jumps" to launch it.
Fire a barely-charged shot and it just hops; fill the gauge all the way and "jumps" sails most of the way across the line. Watch the gauge to feel how stored energy maps to the height of the arc.
The words hang as a Newton's cradle. Lift one end and the momentum travels through the motionless middle and kicks out the word at the far end, the way steel balls pass a click down a line.
Drag a word at either end up and release; the swing passes through the still center to the opposite end.
Pull an end word far back for a big transfer, or barely nudge it for a gentle one. Then grab a word in the middle and let it fall — it hands its motion straight to the ends instead of swinging on its own.
Drag through the sentence and the letters scatter, picking up random kicks as they go. A meter tracks the disorder you've created and never falls — entropy only ever increases, and there is no undo.
Press and drag the cursor through the letters to stir them apart; the meter climbs as they spread.
Make one careful pass and stop — the meter holds its high even as the letters drift to rest. There's no reset button; the only way back to order is to reload the page, which is the point.
Every letter hangs from a rail as its own pendulum. Most swing nearly free, but the letters of "lazy dog" are critically damped, so they stay legible while the rest sway off into chaos.
Click or drag across the hanging letters to set them swinging.
Get the whole sentence moving, then watch "lazy dog" hold still at the end while everything before it blurs. Critical damping is the same trick that keeps a screen door from slamming.
The sentence sits underwater, wobbling in the current. A lens follows your cursor and bends the words by refraction, magnifying them and pulling them sharp only at the focal ring, smeared everywhere else.
Move the lens over the words; they snap into focus where they cross the focal ring.
Hunt for the exact distance where a single word resolves perfectly, then drift past it and watch it melt again. The live piece runs on an underwater teal — say the word and I'll let this thumbnail keep that color too.
"fox" carries a positive charge and "dog" a negative one, so they attract. The words "jumps over" sit between them, legible only while the two are held apart. Let them snap together and the sentence is lost.
Drag "fox" or "dog" around the field; release and watch them pull toward each other.
Try to park them at a gap where "jumps over" stays readable — the pull fights you the whole way. Let go near each other and they snap, the link flashing red as the middle words vanish.
Flick any word and it slides under its own friction. "quick" is nearly frictionless and glides forever; "lazy" has enormous drag and barely moves. Every other word sits somewhere between, so you feel each adjective in your hand.
Grab a word and flick it, letting go mid-motion to send it sliding.
Flick "quick" and "lazy" with the same toss and compare — "quick" coasts across the screen while "lazy" stops almost at once. The friction is tuned to the meaning of the word.
The sentence is strung between two fixed points and made to vibrate. Letters ride the standing wave, so each one is legible only where the wave swells to an antinode and fades to nothing where it pins to a node.
Click the left, middle, or right third to set the first, second, or third harmonic, and click high or low to pluck it hard or soft.
Switch to the third harmonic and find the two still points where the string never moves. The words sitting on those nodes go quiet while the ones between them ring.
Studies after the Reactive Square, Design By Numbers, and Maeda's interference work. No sentence here — just fields of time, digits, and lines that answer to the cursor.
Time rendered as pure motion. Three hands sweep at their own speeds and leave fading trails, the tick nearest the second hand lights up, and a small digital readout keeps count below.
Just watch the time pass; a thin crosshair follows wherever you move.
Watch a full sweep of the second hand and follow the comet trail it leaves, plus the one tick that brightens as it goes by. The face is built from light each frame, not drawn once.
A chain of two dozen dots trails the pointer, each one heavier and slower than the last, so a flick of the mouse cracks like a whip. Faint lines reach to the four corners with a live position readout.
Move the mouse to lead the chain; click to freeze it in place.
Make a fast circle and watch the tail lag into a spiral, then click at the top of a motion to freeze the whip mid-crack and study its curve.
Sixty digits drift and wrap around the screen, flicking to new values on their own timers and scattering away from the cursor. Behind them a faint counter rises — the seconds the page has been open.
Move to push the digits aside; click anywhere to reseed the whole field.
Hold still and watch the background count climb second by second, then sweep the cursor through the drift to carve a clear lane that slowly fills back in.
A step sequencer you conduct with the mouse. Vertical position sets the tempo from 60 to 300 bpm, the background flashes on every hit, and a playhead sweeps the row of beats.
Move up to speed up, down to slow down; click to cycle through four beat patterns.
Find a height where the beat locks into a groove, then click through all four patterns — four-on-the-floor, syncopated, a 3+3+2, and a five-feel — keeping your hand steady.
A typographic playground on paper. Every key you press spawns a giant letter that drifts and slowly fades, while the cursor pulls them all toward it like a gravity well. It opens by spelling out M-A-E-D-A.
Type any keys to fill the field with letters; move the mouse to gather them.
Hold one key down to pile up a swarm of a single letter, then sweep the cursor through to herd the whole flock into a clump before it fades out.
A constellation of drifting points. Any two within range draw a link, and the ones near the cursor brighten, swell, and print the exact pixel distance between them.
Move among the points to light up their connections; click to plant a new point.
Hold near a cluster to read the live distances, then plant a ring of points with repeated clicks and watch a dense web stitch itself together.
After Maeda's Reactive Square (1994). A black square whose edges ripple and burst in response to sound from your microphone, breathing gently when all is quiet.
Click to allow the mic, then make noise; with no mic it answers to cursor motion and clicks.
Allow the microphone and talk or clap to make the edges explode, or skip the mic entirely and fling the cursor across the square to deform it by motion alone.
After Design By Numbers, his teaching language. A grid where every cell holds a grayscale value from 0 to 100, computed from its distance to the cursor, with the raw numbers surfacing on the cells nearest your pointer.
Move to set the field of values; click to redraw it as squares, dots, or lines.
Read the numbers appearing under the cursor and the gradient falling off with distance, then click through all three modes to see the same field as tone, as size, and as direction.
Two identical fields of fine lines lie on top of each other. The cursor offsets and rotates the upper one, and where the two cross, moiré interference fringes bloom and ripple across the surface.
Move to shift the second layer; click to switch between lines, rings, and radial spokes.
Make tiny movements near the center to send slow waves rolling across the field, then click to rings or radial spokes, where the same nudge produces wholly different interference.
After Maeda's Flying Letters. Type a word and it streams toward you out of the dark, each letter scaling up and fading as it passes, then recycling to the far distance. The cursor steers the vanishing point they all fly from.
Type any word and press enter to send it flying; move the mouse to swing the vanishing point around.
Type a long word, then drag the vanishing point to the edge of the screen so the letters arc past you on a steep diagonal instead of head on.
The words FLYING LETTERS hang off your cursor like the tail of a kite. The lead letter tracks your hand exactly and the rest lag behind in a chain, leaning into every turn. Stop moving and the tail falls, straightens, and settles into a readable line.
Move the cursor to fly the kite; hold still and watch the letters drop and comb themselves straight.
Fly a tight loop so the tail crosses its own path, then stop dead and let the word reassemble itself left to right wherever your cursor came to rest.
The same nine words again, now run through the mind instead of through physics. Each piece bends the sentence with one quirk of how we read, parse, and carry meaning, and shows you the seam where sense gives way.
One word, two grammars. Drag "over" onto "jumps" and it reads as an adverb describing the leap. Drag it onto "the lazy dog" and it flips to a preposition naming the place the fox clears. The parse tree rewires as you move it.
Drag the word "over" and drop it near either branch; it snaps to whichever it lands closest to.
Park "over" exactly between the two and let go. Watch which way it falls, then notice how the whole reading of the sentence turns on that one attachment.
A model of how little you see at once. Only the word under your cursor is sharp. Everything around it softens and dims with distance, the way detail collapses outside the small center of your vision.
Move the cursor along the line and read one word at a time.
Try to take in two words at once. You cannot, and feeling yourself fail is the point. Sweep slowly and notice how reading is really a string of tiny jumps.
Stare at a word long enough and it stops meaning anything. Linger on one and it drains toward pure shape, the letters drifting apart, greying, and tilting until you see marks instead of a word. Look away and the meaning floods back.
Rest the cursor on a single word and hold it there.
Hold one word until it goes strange, then jump to its neighbor and watch the first snap back into sense the instant you leave it.
The dog is lazy only while you watch it. Keep your cursor near the word "dog." and it sits still at the end of the sentence. Look away and it creeps off across the screen, always drifting back out of the corner of your eye. You will not catch it moving.
Hold the cursor near the dog to pin it, then move away and try to spot it sneaking off.
Park your cursor on the dog, then yank it across the screen and chase. The dog freezes the instant your gaze lands, so it is always already still by the time you arrive.
The old game of whispered messages, run through translation. The sentence is carried into one language after another and finally back to English, and each hop bends the meaning a little more. What returns is recognizable and wrong.
Pick a chain of languages, then run it and read the sentence drift at every step.
Send it through languages with very different grammar, then through a long chain of close cousins, and compare how far each route pushes the meaning. This one calls a live model to translate.
Two pieces that stop treating the pangram as something to read and start treating it as something to run. One you play against, one runs itself. In both, the words become parts in a system with a life of its own.
The pangram as a lane to defend. Foxes march from the left toward the dog at the far end, and you spend letters to plant word-turrets that fire on anything in range. Kill a fox and you bank letters to build more.
Click above or below the track to place the next word-turret; killing foxes earns the letters to keep placing them.
Leave a gap early and watch a fox slip through to the dog, then rebuild with overlapping ranges so the lane is covered end to end.
The sentence seeds Conway's Game of Life. Its letters are laid down as live cells, then the simple birth-and-death rule takes over. Most of the type dies back at once, but pockets of it settle into still shapes, blinkers, and drifting gliders.
Watch the pangram decay and stabilize; click to add or remove cells, and use the buttons to reseed, pause, or clear.
Reseed and watch the first few generations closely, where the dense words boil down fastest. Then leave it running and hunt for the little oscillators that survive.