This piece nods to the grids and systematic variation in the work of Vera Molnár (1924–2023), the Hungarian-born artist who spent most of her life in Paris and is widely regarded as a pioneer of generative and computer art. She began exploring combinatorial images in the 1950s, learned early programming languages such as Fortran and BASIC, and from 1968 onward used computers and plotters to make algorithmic drawings—often built from simple geometry and repetition with small, rule-based disruptions. Molnár was also among the first women to make computers a core part of a fine-art practice, and she co-founded research groups that linked contemporary art and technology, including Art et Informatique.
Here, a tight field of squares echoes the spirit of those experiments: a strict lattice, then chance and interpolation that gently push the composition away from perfect order—without claiming to reproduce any single Molnár work.
The animation is driven by plain JavaScript in this page (no p5): it builds an SVG layer of square cells on a fixed grid. Each cell gets a vertical gradient by sampling a procedural color field across the canvas—warm reds and magentas toward the top, cool cyans and violets toward the bottom, with dark “ridges” inspired by abstract light. A film-grain filter is applied per path so texture sits only inside each filled square.
Every four seconds, new targets are chosen: each square rolls a fresh size (from a small set of scale steps) and new gradient colors (the whole field shifts together with a shared drift in the sample coordinates). The current values linearly interpolate toward those targets over the same four-second window, so the grid is always slowly moving. On first load, the opening frame already has two states—where each square starts and where it is heading—so motion begins immediately.