Up to a million particles carried by a real, divergence-free fluid velocity field, held loosely to a sculpture — a sphere, a torus, a wave, a ribbon — that they keep dissolving out of and pouring back into. Move across the stage to stir it; switch forms to watch the whole mass migrate.
Hover or touch to stir · drag to orbit · scroll or pinch to zoom.
The fluid is an ABC flow (Arnold–Beltrami–Childress): u = A sin z + C cos y, v = B sin x + A cos z, w = C sin y + B cos x. It is an exact steady solution of the incompressible Euler equations and has zero divergence, so particles neither pile up nor thin out on their own — any clumping you see comes from the sculpture's pull or your stirring. Its streamlines are chaotic for most coefficient choices, which is why the motion never quite repeats. Two copies at different scales are layered, with B and C drifting slowly over time.
Each particle's position, velocity and age live in a GPU buffer and are advanced every frame by a vertex shader using transform feedback — the CPU never touches them after the first frame. Every particle also has a home on the current form, derived from its index; Cohesion is the stiffness of a spring toward that home. When a particle's age runs out it respawns there, so the sculpture keeps re-forming even while the flow tears it apart.
Frames accumulate in a half-float buffer that fades by the Trails factor each frame, then pass through a 1 − e−x tone curve, so dense regions saturate softly instead of clipping. Colour is Palette Synth's cosine gradient a + b·cos(2π(c·t + d)) indexed by particle speed.
In the spirit of the fluid "data painting" and data-sculpture installations of Refik Anadol and Ouchhh, and the generative particle systems of fuse*. No machine-learning model or dataset is involved here — the "latent" is a mathematical flow — and it is not a recreation of or affiliated with any of those works.