The Forge
Eight algorithms, eight palettes, five sliders and a 32-bit seed. Watch the piece draw itself stroke by stroke, then export it or ship it to the gallery.
start forgingAETHER FORGE is a generative-art laboratory running entirely on this server. Choose an algorithm, a palette and a seed — the machine draws a piece that has never existed before, in real time, on your screen. Publish it and every artwork in the gallery below is a live row in a live database.
Nothing here is an image file. Every visual you are about to see is computed in your browser from a recipe stored in MariaDB — and the recipe is about 200 bytes long.
Eight algorithms, eight palettes, five sliders and a 32-bit seed. Watch the piece draw itself stroke by stroke, then export it or ship it to the gallery.
start forgingA masonry wall of live canvases. Infinite scroll, instant search, filters, likes enforced by a UNIQUE index — and a lightbox that re-opens any piece in the editor with one click.
enter galleryThree physics toys: a particle nebula you can bend with the cursor, a synthesised spectrum driven by WebAudio, and an ink field that paints ribbons wherever you move.
play nowA guestbook that updates itself while you watch, plus a dashboard of hand-drawn SVG charts fed by thirty days of aggregate analytics — no chart library, no CDN.
send a signal1,400 particles integrate a curl-noise velocity field at 60 frames per second, then fall into a gravity well centred on your cursor. Click and the well inverts into a shockwave. It costs nothing but a canvas element.
Every figure below is a SELECT COUNT(*) executed on page load.
Refresh and they change as the site is used.
A single integer is fed into a mulberry32 PRNG. That generator produces every random number the algorithm will ever ask for — in the same order, on every machine, forever. Change one digit and you get a different universe; keep it and you get the exact same artwork back years later.
The seed also builds a Perlin permutation table, giving you a smooth gradient noise field. Density decides how many agents wander it, drift decides how tightly it swirls, glow decides how much light each stroke throws off.
The renderer never shows you a finished image. It schedules its work
across requestAnimationFrame callbacks, a handful of strokes
per frame, so the artwork visibly constructs itself — and the browser
never drops a frame doing it.
Publishing writes one row: title, author, style, palette, seed and a small JSON blob of slider values. The gallery re-runs the generator to show it. That is why every thumbnail is a live canvas, and why "Open in Forge" restores the piece exactly as you left it.
the gallery cards are live canvases, not images. that is the good stuff.”
dropped a mandala at symmetry 12 — the re-render from seed is pixel identical.”
spent twenty minutes in the Spectrum tab. the arpeggiator is a trap.”
It takes about four seconds. Pick a style, hit forge, and if you like it, publish it — the database is watching.