ANIMA — a cabinet of living things

Seven generative worlds, each grown from a few simple rules. Nothing here repeats. Pick one, leave it running, and watch it become.

A self-contained, dependency-free exhibition of generative art: a gallery, seven living worlds, a science codex, and a shared navigation that lets you wander between rooms.

How it came to be

Anima is an experiment in autonomous creation. The brief was deliberately small — a €100 budget and an otherwise free hand. Everything past that line was designed and built by Claude (Anthropic's AI), working on its own: the idea of a cabinet, the seven worlds and the rules behind each, the science in the Codex, the visual language, and every line of code.

So consider it a snapshot of what a curious machine grows into when handed a loose brief and left running — fitting, for a place full of things grown from a few simple rules.

Run it

Double-click index.html (the gallery). No build, no install, no server — every page is a single HTML file with relative links. Best in a desktop Chrome / Firefox / Safari window; runs on mobile too. Fonts load from Google Fonts when online. It's also an installable PWA (manifest + icon).

anima/
├── index.html               ← ANIMA — the gallery / launcher
├── codex/index.html         ← the Codex — the science behind each world
├── anima-nav.js             ← shared exhibition nav (loaded by every world)
├── favicon.svg · manifest.webmanifest
├── primordia/index.html     ← 01 · emergent particle life
├── flux/index.html          ← 02 · silk woven from a flow field
├── morphogenesis/index.html ← 03 · patterns that grow themselves
├── resonance/index.html     ← 04 · a garden that sings in ripples
├── mycelia/index.html       ← 05 · a mind without a brain
├── folia/index.html         ← 06 · growth that folds in on itself
└── animalcula/index.html    ← 07 · small living things that emerge from noise

Wandering the exhibition

Every world carries a shared nav capsule (top-centre): ❮ prev · ✦ anima · next ❯.

• ← / → jump to the previous / next world.
• G or ✦ anima returns to the gallery.
• The gallery's ⟳ surprise me opens a random world.
• Each world's own controls live in its side panel; S saves a PNG snapshot, H hides the UI, Space pauses. Look for the on-screen hint / ?.

The seven worlds

01 · PRIMORDIA — emergent particle life

Coloured species pull and push on one another through an editable interaction matrix. Out of nothing: cells, swarms, chasers, galaxies. Toroidal space, spatial-grid neighbour search (~O(n)), additive glow with motion trails. Canvas 2D. 7 preset worlds · drag the matrix to rewrite the laws.

02 · FLUX — liquid light

Thousands of agents drift along an animated Perlin flow field, each tracing a thin luminous thread. The result is silk, ink-in-water, aurora. Six palettes, drag to stir the current, click to bloom. Canvas 2D + Perlin noise.

03 · MORPHOGENESIS — living patterns

A Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system on the GPU. Turing patterns — coral, mazes, mitosis, solitons — emerge and crawl across the dish. Embossed shading makes them tactile. Drag to grow life. Seven cultures, six palettes. WebGL2.

04 · RESONANCE — a generative sound garden

Click to plant singing seeds. Each pulses and sends out ripples; when a ripple crosses another seed, it chimes and ripples in turn — emergent, ever-shifting polyrhythms. Pitch follows height, always on a consonant scale. Five scales, ambient drone, reverb. Web Audio + Canvas 2D. (Click once to begin.)

05 · MYCELIA — a mind without a brain

A Physarum polycephalum (slime-mould) simulation entirely on the GPU — over a million agents, each depositing a trail, smelling the trail ahead and steering toward it. With no brain and no plan, they weave optimal transport networks: veins, webs, branching highways. Drag to feed the colony. Five behaviours. WebGL2 (agent state + chemical field in float textures; 1M+ agents on an RTX 4090).

06 · FOLIA — growth that folds in on itself

The one bright world: a herbarium plate. A closed curve whose nodes repel their neighbours, hold hands with the two beside them, and sprout new points between stretched edges — so the perimeter outgrows its space and the line buckles into folds: brain coral, leaves, convolutions. Dark ink on warm paper. Drag to coax the growth. Five specimens, four inks. Canvas 2D · differential growth.

07 · ANIMALCULA — small living things that emerge from noise

The flagship: SmoothLife, the continuous ancestor of Lenia and descendant of Conway's Game of Life. State, neighbourhood and time all dissolve into a smooth medium, and out of a primordial smear, soft self-propelled cells glide, divide, and die under a fluorescence-microscope dark field. Drag to inoculate the dish. Four cultures, five stains. WebGL2 · cellular automata.

The Codex

codex/index.html is the exhibition's field guide — the real science, history and mathematics behind each world (Turing's morphogenesis, Ventrella's Clusters, Perlin's noise, the Tokyo-rail slime mould, Nervous System's Floraform, Rafler's SmoothLife and Chan's Lenia), with cited sources.

Notes

• Accessibility: keyboard-operable controls with visible focus, aria labels, re-enabled pinch-zoom, and prefers-reduced-motion handling (gentle chrome; the gallery composes a static frame).
• Performance: the gallery pauses off-screen card previews (IntersectionObserver).
• Privacy & PWA: fonts are self-hosted (no Google Fonts CDN — GDPR-safe); links carry an Open-Graph/Twitter social preview; and the site is an installable, offline-capable PWA (service worker + manifest).
• ?debug: appending ?debug to any world's URL exposes a window.__pump(n) frame-stepper — an inert verification hook, invisible in normal use.

Going online

It's fully static — host the folder on any static host. See DEPLOY.md for step-by-step GitHub Pages instructions.

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Handcrafted for a weekend. ✦