The Soul

The whole picture is a single fragment shader. Each pixel measures how far it is from the centre and at what angle, is pushed about by several layers of Perlin noise, and then has its red, green and blue each set by a sine function. Pixels beyond a certain distance are painted black, which leaves a circle. At the first Creative Coding community meetup in April 2022 he used the work to show how simple a shader can be: find the angle from the centre, make an offset like a mountain range, then paint in the colour.

There is no random seed, only time and the mouse. When no one touches it, the program walks an invisible mouse in circles over the picture; the centre of the eye shifts slightly with it and the colours turn. The circling and the ripple just outside the pupil come back to their starting point together about every 12.6 seconds. The moment a visitor moves the mouse, the circling stops and the eye is handed to that hand.

The sketch branches from Fire Bamboo, a daily piece of July 2020. Compared with his earlier works built from geometry, the shader texture is far finer and holds up to enlargement; in a livestream in March 2022 he pointed to The Soul and said: “Its texture is actually made with a shader, so you can blow it up really, really big.”

There is also a very slow cycle in the formula. The size of the eye rises and falls with the sine of the time divided by a thousand, one round trip every two thousand π seconds, about a hundred and five minutes. Twenty-six minutes after opening, the eye is at its smallest and the pupil all but gone; at seventy-nine minutes the eye pushes past the edge of the canvas and the pupil is at its widest.

Very near the centre, the formula first turns the distance into a negative number and, on the next line, takes its logarithm. The logarithm of a negative number is undefined, so what that small disc becomes is left to whichever machine is computing the picture at the moment.

The same eye therefore has several pupils. In the images he saved on 11 November 2021, the spot is a spray of fine radiating lines; in the one saved on 23 November, which later became the minted image, it is solid black, and so it was in the eyes projected in Taipei 101 in 2022. In 2026, on one computer at one instant, the browser computing on the graphics card draws a pink disc there, and software rendering draws a starburst.

The header of this page and the breathing images fill that disc with black, returning the eye to how it looked in the minted image and in the exhibition. The self-hosted generator is unchanged to the last character; which pupil you see when you open it depends on your computer.

The sound grows from the program in real time as well. Every hundred frames (about 1.7 seconds at sixty frames a second) it draws two notes from the C, E-flat and G of a C minor triad, one in the low register and one in the high. Each note is a single sine wave that rises over one second, holds for anywhere up to five, then fades over another second, each at its own volume; eight voices take turns, so new notes settle over ones that have not yet died away. The draw has no seed, so every opening is a different piece.

On 18 May 2022 Chaos Laboratory opened at AMBI SPACE ONE on the fifth floor of Taipei 101, with projection on all four walls and the floor. When The Soul came round, a whole row of eyes lined both sides of the room and another lay on the floor, so that anyone who walked in stood beside a pupil. At the opening he performed live at the console, switching twenty layers with a Launchpad and a MIDI keyboard; from 20 to 22 May the public saw a recording of the performance.

It has left the projection walls once since. On 18 November 2023 the Light Point film programme in Shanghai screened its 4K version at the Shanghai Film Art Center.