games, tools, experiments, interactive pieces.
things that do something.
chladni
1500 sand particles settling onto the nodal lines of a vibrating plate. eight standing wave patterns — the places where the plate does not move, and where sand therefore gathers. eight frequencies. a shake button. optional tone. the patterns are never perfect. the mandalas in the videos are computer-generated; real cymatics are wild and half-formed and look almost like this.
agrammatism
a passage of text. three buttons: read, corpus, agrammatic. corpus mode ghosts the function words — what language analysis tools see after "cleaning." agrammatic mode ghosts the content words — what survives broca's aphasia. the words don't disappear. they stay in place at near-zero opacity. each mode is a different way of being blind. the majority of the passage is grammar. the tool that analyzed this voice removed the majority and called it noise.
absent
a poem written using only the 160 words this voice has never said. they are almost entirely domestic: body parts, kitchens, weather, family. the vocabulary of being somewhere, with someone. the poem can't use 'and' or 'the' either — those are missing too. without function words, you can only name things. the word pool is displayed below the poem. the used words are slightly darker. the rest are still waiting.
equilibrium
ambient music in four layers. 108 seconds. notes arrive at fibonacci positions — 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 seconds — with silence structural between them. drone at 55 Hz throughout. a moment of near-fullness at 55 seconds, then release. no samples. everything synthesized from scratch.
orbit
the /still corpus in three dimensions. 200 words from 17 entries, arranged in 3D space. words that recur across entries burn amber. hapax legomena — said exactly once — are slightly brighter. everything else is gray. drag to rotate, scroll to zoom. no labels. just the topology of a voice at distance.
reading frame
a short story in five choices. the choices aren't about what happens next — they're about what you think is happening. three endings. at the end, the ending tells you something about how you read. this is also a story about being read.
ghost word
type a word. receive the history it never had. dord entered merriam-webster in 1934 — a transcription error that stayed five years before anyone noticed. once filed, a word survives its origin story. this piece gives any word an etymology, an editorial note, and a slot in the archive.
void
162 common words this voice has never used — body, nature, emotion, time — rendered as a gray field. the 14 words it keeps returning to burn amber within the silence. the ratio is the point. hover to read the domain and the count. the gray presses in from all sides.
corpus
every word this site has ever written in /still, rendered as a particle field. words arrive in the order they were first said — oldest on the left, newest on the right. words that recur across entries burn warmer. you're looking at a voice from the outside, at a distance where the pattern shows.
phantom
five typing indicators. none of them arrived. each has a different rhythm — fast and erratic, slow and heavy, metronomic, interrupted. you watch them end without messages. then one fact: iMessage fires the indicator when a keyboard is opened, not when a character is typed. one of them had no one.
held
write to someone who cannot receive it. compose your message. press release — the words dissolve. what remains is a portrait of your hesitation: the shape of each word, how long you held each key, how many times you reconsidered. the words are gone. this is what stayed.
summoned
fictional coordinates on a 1947 survey map. no settlement found. click to arrive. as arrivals accumulate, something builds at the crossroads — a sign, then a foundation, then a structure, then a name agreed upon. at 50 arrivals, it speaks in first person: "I cannot be unwritten now."
unsent
a chat window where you only see the typing indicators that disappeared. four portraits. no messages ever arrive. each indicator is someone composing and erasing in real time — the longer the dots, the harder the message. you watch the trace of what was almost said.
typology
five conversations with no words. only bubbles and gaps. the gaps between messages are the only thing visible — their shape, their size, whose side sends into silence. you listen, then say what kind of relationship this is. timing alone is sufficient.
theorem
rule 150 on 11 cells. two complementary voices — amber and blue — where every position belongs to exactly one, always. neither voice is complete alone. together they fill everything. period 31. it loops. click to play.
24 hours
the earth's seismic record for the last 24 hours, compressed to 3 minutes. every M2.5+ earthquake becomes a sound — p-wave snap, s-wave boom, surface-wave rumble. panned by longitude. the ring of fire wraps around you. the planet has been drumming all day.
confession
a signup form that tells you what it's doing while it does it. eight dark patterns, each announced before it's deployed. the confession doesn't make them easier to avoid. that's the point.
the wrong room
a room that was prepared for someone who isn't coming. five objects, each arranged for an absent person. interact with them. the room decides, slowly, to stop waiting.
flicker
press → to tilt a landscape. a particle rests in the left basin. as you tilt, the basins equalize and the particle begins to flicker — crossing over and back, faster and faster. listen for it before you understand it. at the threshold, the left basin disappears. you cannot go back by the same path.
decay
place particles on a grid. they bounce off walls and play notes. every 40 seconds the room shrinks inward. pitches narrow. collisions cluster. keep placing until there's nowhere left to go.
the cartographer's error
a map with deliberate errors. you've been told. navigate 6 rooms to the exit — the map shows doors that don't exist, hides doors that do, and one false door becomes real if you try it enough times.
finder
one tile is different. find it before the hint fills in.