MEMORIA 028

Full piece · 03:00 · Sound is essential · Headphones recommended

Six typographic universes gather, strain, and collapse. Ink, gravity, polarity—and what remains.

MEMORIA 028 is a three-minute generative audiovisual piece made for the Assembly Summer 2026 AI Coding competition. It begins as a restrained field of punctuation and gradually turns that vocabulary into stars, eyes, bodies, pressure waves and catastrophic reversals. My first demoscene production, it was selected for the twenty-entry stage show and ran there from the real executable rather than a prerecorded video — a slow, monochrome, typography-only piece in a field of pixel art, retro graphics and 3D demos.

One lifecycle, six universes

Each universe follows one node's lifecycle: a point gathers glyphs through a gravity field, develops an opening at its centre, strains, collapses, and reverses the polarity of its world. A universe may contain one node or several, but each has its own spatial rules, density, scale and composition. The sequence moves from distant stars to close, dense encounters before the last universe exceeds the frame.

The camera changes position and distance without behaving like a simple zoom. New worlds begin arriving before the old one has completely vanished, so scattered glyphs gather around forms that are already in motion.

Colour and sound

The work stays almost entirely ink and paper until colour begins spreading through the glyph field. Each universe uses a different simulation language: pressure dye, territorial cells, coarsening droplets and other centre-born systems that eventually saturate the available ground. The palette is generated in OKLCH from a seeded golden-angle sequence. The last universe alone keeps a reserved cerulean band.

The score starts as a quiet industrial atmosphere. Half-formed collapse waves breathe outward and return. Bass, tremble and density climb with every reversal, while each new world inherits a slightly higher floor than the last. The last universe holds at the brink well past the expected break, then at the reversal the roar is pulled almost completely away, leaving a thin, high tone for the roll call and title.

How it was built

The piece is a deterministic JavaScript programme using WebGL2 for the glyph field, Web Audio for the procedural score, and Electron for the portable stage build. A single 180-second score controls composition, colour, gravity, breath, camera, polarity and sound, while the same source supports both real-time playback and frame-accurate offline capture. The score's own readout — time, section, world, polarity — stays in the corner throughout; the piece is a running programme and never pretends otherwise.

I authored the concept and directed the visual system, narrative, pacing, composition, sound behaviour, editing and final evaluation. Claude, Codex, Grok and Gemini contributed across planning, implementation, research and audio synthesis. The process was intensely iterative: outputs were tested against the running piece, rejected or redirected when they missed the intended language, and polished through repeated full-length watches.

Full piece · 03:00 · Sound is essential · Headphones recommended

A sparse field of punctuation beginning to gather on paper — The opening field, before anything gathers

Two typographic gravity wells drawn only in ink — Two eyes · paired wells

A fine radial spiral of glyphs on a near-white ground — One node · radial breath

A dense radial field compressing toward a dark centre — Strain before the reversal

Orange territories spreading through a field of glyphs — Colour arriving · territorial spread

Coloured glyph rings crossing a quiet paper field during the roll call — The roll call after the final collapse

MEMORIA title and the surviving glyph set arranged as a type case — What remains

MEMORIA 028 performing on the Assembly stage — Running live at Assembly Summer 2026

Audience watching the AI Coding competition at Assembly Summer 2026 — AI Coding stage show