MB · The Lab

EXP. 002 · Suminagashi, Surveyed

Next tap: deposit · drag: carve

The Lab — EXP. 002 · the ink family, surveyed

Flow, drawn as terrain.

A fluid solver, read like a survey instead of an ink tray: contour lines where the flow banks, iron-filing hachures down the slopes, ember pressure lines only while the water moves. Tap to deposit ground, tap again to push it outward, drag to carve.

EXP. 002 — Notes

Suminagashi, Surveyed

Underneath is a real fluid solver — the same “stable fluids” method film and games use: a grid of velocities advected each frame, a pressure solve to keep the water incompressible, ink carried along for the ride. The trick is the rendering: the ink field is read as elevation and drawn as a survey — contour lines, hillshade, hachures downhill, and pressure isobars that appear only where the solver's own pressure is actually doing work.

You never see demand move — between channels, between cohorts, between you and a competitor. You see levels: this week's number, last week's number. The flow is invisible until you build the view that shows it, which is the entire job of instrumentation. Same water, two legibilities.

The applied version: prefer views that render the current, not the level — cohort flows, switching diagrams, week-over-week deltas. And steal the isobar rule: mark pressure only where something is moving. Alert on change, not on state.

A tray of water holds a mountain range for a second at a time. Touch it and the cartographer redraws the country under your finger — every ridge a memory of a current, every contour an argument that the invisible was there.

  1. Mechanism under test: a real-time fluid solver (stable fluids: semi-Lagrangian advection, Jacobi pressure projection, a breath of vorticity confinement) — read as a SURVEY rather than as ink: dye density becomes elevation, hillshaded and contoured like a topographic sheet; the ember isobars are the solver’s own pressure field and exist only while the water moves.
  2. Lineage: the C1 journal's ink drops and the gallery's Suminagashi Studies approximate this craft with combed geometry (CRAFT §4: gain 0.55, one relaxation pass, ring-depth scaling). This is the phenomenon those rules were imitating.
  3. The traditional rhythm is the interface: real suminagashi alternates an ink-loaded brush with a dispersant-loaded one. Taps here keep that rhythm — deposit, then push — so ridges form the way rings do; the drag is the marbler’s stylus, carving.
  4. Honest instruments: the hachure strokes are iron filings for flow — aligned down the height gradient at rest, torqued by velocity while it runs. And stillness is real: when the water settles the simulation stops entirely — zero frames — waking on touch. The opening gesture is seeded and scripted, then the stylus is yours.
  5. What might graduate: the phenomenon→record pair is now BUILT INTO the render — the fluid and its measured drawing are the same picture. Candidates: contour/hachure rendering for figure grounds; pointer-as-hands (DIRECTION stage 4); the settled survey as an article hero.

PHYSICS — raw WebGL2 + EXT_color_buffer_float, no libraries, single file · seeded opening (mulberry32) · fixed-dt steps · sim sleeps at stillness (zero idle frames; visibility-gated) · reduced motion = the settled survey as a still, tray untouched · no-float-GL = designed fallback · zero console errors.

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