OFFICINALab

The cloth is a 62 × 42 grid of particles, stepped with Verlet integration. Stretch, shear and bend constraints hold it together, and the top edge hangs from a few hooks. It always rests on some surface: in the workshop it lay over a statue’s depth map; on the first screen it lies over the print of St Michael. The name is stitched in gold along its hem.

Scrolling only sets a target for the top edge to rise to. Where the pointer holds the cloth, a temporary pin appears; let go, and the cloth falls back under its own weight.

Each figure is written as a list of construction steps: draw the axis, draw a circle, draw another from where they cross, join the points where circles touch. Every step has its own duration, and the compass’s needle and pencil move across the picture as it is drawn. When the construction is finished it fades, and the tracery is traced over it in gold.

The same drawing appears in three places: the tracery hanging in the Lab chapter of the homepage, the opening when you arrive, and the construction lines round every caption as it rises.

Every frame, the scene is drawn twice: once as the full-screen negative, and once as the positive, only in a small patch round the crystal. The crystal’s shader refracts and magnifies the positive through a sphere, with a little dispersion at the rim, and sets it back into the negative.

Three cuts were tried: a ball, a rose cut and a stained-glass roundel. Only the ball stayed. It lands with a little bounce and leaves by shrinking where it is, and a pause in the scroll doesn’t make it flicker.

The fire is a heat map. It starts at the point you clicked, and the heat spreads outward cell by cell. Where it passes, the page browns, then chars, then burns through. Through the holes you see the title page of the place you’re going: a red numeral, a Latin name, the place’s name and address. Before the fire has finished, the browser is already on its way.

It was first made for the last wall of the homepage, where every window to somewhere off the site opened through this fire. That wall now lets you out through the window itself, the same way as every other passage on the site, and the fire stayed in the workshop.

The statue’s normals, depth and shading are drawn first into a set of off-screen buffers; then, in screen space, each pixel is given one of four hands. Engraved lines follow the shading, denser where it is dark; halftone dots grow and shrink with the light; one-bit dither keeps only black and white; and the words set the essays cell by cell inside the statue’s outline, brighter where the stone is lit.

Of the four statues on the site, the Winged Victory and the grave angel are drawn in lines, Demosthenes in words, and the Pensieroso in the workshop takes all four hands in turn.

The smoke is a 2D stable fluid solved on the GPU: a velocity field, a density field, and a vorticity term that curls it into small eddies. The censer sways a little at the source, so the smoke never takes the same path twice.

It is drawn in engraved strokes, the way Doré drew clouds. Behind it hangs a plate that shows only where the smoke passes and fades as it clears. On the table in the Music chapter of the homepage, incense rises from a quatrefoil and the covers appear in the smoke.

The lichen isn’t a texture; it grows in the stone’s shader. Layers of noise decide where it covers, and inside that area it is scattered with stippled grains and small patches, thinner in the carved letters. How much of a stone it covers depends on the stone’s year.

The letters come from a white-on-black image, and the shader uses its gradient to work out how light from the upper left falls into the cuts, so the letters are carved in, not printed on.

The fragments are scattered through space with no apparent order. Their shapes were worked backwards from a single viewpoint: seen from the candle, each fragment’s shadow falls on one stroke of the name. Move the viewpoint, and the shadows fall apart.

In the end the experiment wasn’t used on the site; it stayed in the workshop.

Under everything is a held chord of four voices singing “ah”. Each voice is two slightly detuned sawtooth waves passed through two vowel formants, then sent into a reverb more than four seconds long. The reverb’s impulse response is a burst of decaying noise made the moment the sound is switched on, its highs dying faster than its lows, so it sounds like a large stone room.

Each chapter has its own chord. As the camera moves on, the chord slides voice by voice into the next one; the deeper the camera, the longer the reverb; the faster the scroll, the louder the air. Passing through a window is a breath and then a bell, its partials in the ratios of a cast bell and tuned to the next chapter’s chord. The crystal set down and picked up is two touches of glass; a work lifted from the wall is a low weight; and each year’s stone sounds a low bell, lower the older the stone.

Everything goes through a limiter that keeps the peaks below about −16 dBFS, well under a speaking voice, and it stops when you switch tabs. The switch remembers your choice for the next visit. It was tuned by measurement rather than by ear: each sound rendered offline on its own, its peak, loudness and tail measured, and its spectrogram checked for clicks.