22.12.2022 was the day I released my generative art piece 'The End' on FxHash.

I was stuck, mentally, physically and digitally. Late 2022 felt like being stuck in a loop. Scrolling through feeds, refreshing tabs, navigating through the same patterns every day. The world outside was burning, flooding, dying and my window to the world was infinite content spinning in circles.

I just wanted to hit the pause button. For the anxiety to end.

To escape.

But there was no exit. The accidental megastructure was designed to contain and control. The feed regenerates, the content never stops, and we participate like cogs in the machine providing an endless stream of feedback, hopelessly unaware of our own power.

So I made THE END.

4 iterations from the series, The end

Not as escape. As something else. I wanted to simulate that exact feeling of being stuck, of spinning in place, of wanting it to end but having nowhere to go. But instead of making it suffocating, instead of creating more anxiety, I wanted to make it... fun. Surreal. Magical. Like a glimpse of sunshine in the rain.

The End

Inspired by the fidget spinner, the end is a digital experience leveraging an organic, cosmic and vibrant aesthetic, paired with ambient 90's video game music, to create a subtle trancelike state evoking a sense of calm, melancholy and wonder.

You load it and the window fills up with cosmic forms gently gliding across the screen - leaving behind organic patterns that look like bacterial colonies under a microscope. The music draws you back in time, maybe a time when you were younger and it feels something relatable, almost nostalgic but something you haven't seen or experienced before.

The micro and the macro collapse into each other - like you're standing on a circle where walking in one direction makes things infinitely small and walking the other makes them infinitely large, until somehow both directions meet at the same point.

You can drag it around. Spin it. Watch it rotate with that satisfying momentum of something catching motion. You can keep spinning it, over and over, the same loop repeating. Just like scrolling. Just like the trap you're already in.

An iteration from the series, The end

But here's the thing - it's beautiful. The patterns are mesmerizing. The audio is strange but compelling. The cosmic scale makes your small compulsive spinning feel somehow grand, somehow connected to something larger. You're still stuck in a loop, but this loop is different, it's not recycled, it's emergent. The act of experience in this case, brings it to life.

I built it using reaction-diffusion - the mathematics that creates leopard spots, bacterial colonies, the branching of neurons. Layered on top of simple shapes, to create cosmic sensibilities. I warped the space those patterns emerge in. Same algorithm, bent geometry. The 3D space is randomized, and moves in its own unique way, accommodating your feedback if the user chooses to interact with it, creating a fresh perspective. The filter system does the rest of the magic.

Snapshot of the visual steps of the outcomes of the different parts of the steps as the effects get stacked on top of each other.

Both the visuals and audio come from a single hash seed. One string of characters that branches into image and sound simultaneously. They're synchronized expressions of the same underlying state. Change the seed, everything transforms together.

Snapshot of the underlying architecture for the digital experience. Made with love using cables.gl.

Each iteration on FxHash is different - different seed, different patterns, different tones. But the structure stays the same, the source code is still the same. You're still spinning something that goes nowhere. But it's producing something unexpected every time.

The Magic

This was my first time making generative audio. I'm not a musician. The sounds came out melancholic and weird and I kept them because that's what emerged. Sometimes you let the system do what it does and decide the result is worth keeping.

An iteration from the series, The end

What I realized while making this: I could have made it claustrophobic. I could have made it feel like suffocation, like the prison closing in. That would have been honest - that would have reflected the feeling of being stuck accurately.

But I didn't want to make something that felt like the trap. I wanted to make something that felt like a way out, a sense of possibility, or even hope. Made cosmic. Made playful. Made into something you'd want to spin even though you know it goes nowhere.

The fidget spinner spins because it has nowhere else to go. But there's something hypnotic about that. Something almost peaceful once you stop fighting it. The loop continues, the patterns emerge and dissolve and emerge again, and somehow that's okay.

An iteration from the series, The end

An ode to living this life

There is a lingering feeling of time having escaped through our grasp as we were just about to comprehend the meaning of our short lives. Unlike our cosmos both above and below - the universe and the microscopic world, omnipresent and continuous - time can sometimes feel like a prison.

A boat without a sail in the sea. An astronaut without a spaceship.

The loop continues. The fidget spinner keeps spinning. The patterns keep emerging at scales both cellular and astronomical. And somehow, that's not suffocating anymore. It's generative. It's emergent. It's beautiful.

2022 had been brutal. The year-end didn't bring escape, didn't bring solutions. But it brought this: a loop that creates instead of drains. Patterns that emerge instead of repeat. The same structure, somehow different.

Maybe that's enough.

An iteration from the series, The end

Link to the artwork