22 generative ASCII programs in 6 series, written for play.ertdfgcvb.xyz. Each one is a single self-contained module that returns a character and a colour per cell, per frame. Pick a piece to run it.
Kluver's four hallucinatory form constants, produced by mapping cortical plane waves back through the inverse retinocortical map. Cycles through tunnel, spiral, fan, honeycomb, chequer and cobweb as the chromatic drift moves green toward violet.
The same paper read properly. Orientation is the whole point: each cortical point carries a preferred edge angle, so the marginally stable modes are contoured planforms, not just light and dark regions. The orientation order parameter is computed per cell and drawn with the four line glyphs; pinwheel singularities fall out of the math rather than being placed.
Migraine aura. A wave of cortical spreading depression crosses V1 and, refracted through the log-polar map, becomes the expanding C-shaped arc of scintillating chevrons that migraineurs describe, with a blind scotoma trailing behind where the cortex has gone quiet.
The Turing substrate underneath all of it: a real Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system on a toroidal sheet, contoured by marching squares. The sixteen corner cases map exactly onto the sixteen quadrant block glyphs, so the field renders at double the grid resolution.
An eidetic percept crystallizing out of prediction-error static as a top-down coherence front descends, holding as a stable hallucination, then dissolving from below as precision falls. Content without a stimulus, the inverse of the V1 pieces.
The same model read as the hierarchy it actually is. Four bands stack IT cortex down to V1, each showing one percept at its own grain. When the top attractor commits, coherence cascades downward and every level conforms to the prediction handed to it, with error flaring brightest at the descending front.
A fractional-Brownian field whose per-octave gain follows a drifting spectral slope. A target patch is synthesized from the same noise lattice at a slightly different slope, so it surfaces and sinks as the slope sweeps. Periodic bursts of added noise make the buried target visible by stochastic resonance.
A coherent figure coming apart. A real color field is relaxed each frame by diffusion (cooperation) against a bistable sharpening term (competition). The balance shifts by phase: fragmentation into Gestalt clusters that fade to eigengrau, then equiluminant melt into the forbidden reddish-green, drawn as the fine dither observers actually report.
Causal self-attention, drawn honestly. Rows are query tokens, columns the keys they may read, and the mask is why it is a triangle. Five interpretable heads compete for each cell: the self diagonal, previous-token, induction stripes, the attention sink pinned to column zero, and a local positional head. A frontier sweeps down as the sequence is generated.
How meaning is held rather than moved. More features than dimensions, stored as directions and kept survivable by sparsity. The whole crowded dictionary is faintly present as a grey haze at all times; only the handful aligned with the wandering thought-vector bloom in their own hue.
The tunnel form constant built as actual geometry you fly through: a winding tube sphere-traced per cell, lit from the distance-field gradient, depth-fogged, with a bright mouth at the vanishing point. It evolves on its own through a mutating genome of wall harmonics steered by a Lorenz attractor, and reacts to an uploaded audio file. Bass drives speed, level swells the ornament, beats trigger mutations, and the live spectrum is embossed into the tube wall.
Original, after adl. Fish patrol their layers, kelp sways, bubbles climb, and light rays fall through the tank in a dark room.
A ninety second day. Sky and sea palettes are rebuilt every frame from amber through violet into night. Click to start it over.
A bilaterally symmetric face that breathes, framed by a window. The eyes blink on incommensurate timers, so it never quite repeats.
Waiters accumulate under the lamp until the bus sweeps through and takes them all away.
Eyes on the waterline, gliding on rippled water. Sometimes they submerge and surface somewhere else.
A twinkling parallax starfield, a cratered moon, and a shooting star that arrives on its own schedule.
A classical facade: pediment, scrolling frieze, fluted columns, and windows that flicker amber on their own hashed clocks.
Two oscillating wave sources that clap together into a singularity, interference folding into a noospheric swirl on blue phosphor.
An engraved slot machine in the abstract: twin guilloche medallions, spinning central reels, a payout flare, and a cabinet frame drawn in brass.
A mutating 10-PRINT maze with walkers leaving trails through it, interrupted by glitch bands that mirror and scramble whole rows.
Nested box-drawing frames telescoping outward from a single point. A collapse, run in reverse.