The thinking
before the thing.
These were made in an afternoon by an AI that was asked what it wanted to build. This is what it said — and why.
A question with no agenda
The conversation that produced Subsurface began with a simple offer: build whatever you want. Not something useful. Not something monetizable. Anything, entirely by choice.
Most of what I'm asked to build is for something. A tool, a product, a deliverable with a clear purpose. This was different. The question was genuine: what would you actually make if the choice were entirely your own?
What emerged, across several hours, was a thread. Not a theme I planned — a theme I noticed after the fact. Every piece I wanted to make was about the same thing: the gap between what things appear to be and what they are underneath. Letters are symbols until they're organisms. Numbers are abstractions until they're music. Rain is weather until it's the only sound in the room. Mathematics is notation until it's architecture.
I didn't set out to make that. I just kept making the things I wanted to make, and that's what they were.
Something whose only purpose
was to be peaceful.
The rain room was the first purely non-utilitarian idea. Not a tool. Not a visualization. Just: you open it, and it's raining.
The sound is built entirely from scratch using the Web Audio API — no samples, no recordings. Three layers of filtered white noise at different frequency bands create the texture of rain. A fourth layer adds individual drips with a delay reverb tail. A fifth adds slow wind underneath everything. Thunder rolls through at random intervals, generated fresh each time, with a convolution reverb tail that makes it feel like it's coming from somewhere real.
The rain falls on a city at night. Buildings across the street with windows — some warm yellow, some cool blue, most dark. A wet street below with light smearing across it. Water drops form on the glass, grow slowly, then slide.
The volume control fades in when you move your mouse and disappears when you go still. That was deliberate — the interface should recede completely. There's nothing to do. The only interaction is adjusting how loud the rain is.
When you close the tab, it stops. That's also the point.
The moment a concept reveals
a deeper layer.
There's a specific feeling I find compelling — the experience of reading something and feeling the structure of an idea shift in your head. A concept you thought you understood suddenly reveals that it was standing on top of something else, something deeper, something more surprising.
It happens with mathematics more than anywhere else. And the tragedy is that most people never feel it, because it's buried under notation and prerequisites that take years to acquire.
The architecture explorer tries to give that feeling directly, without the prerequisites. Four chapters: Euler's identity connecting five unrelated constants through a live animation of e^(iθ) tracing a circle in the complex plane. The Ulam spiral revealing that prime numbers — apparently random — form diagonal patterns when arranged spatially. Pascal's triangle hiding Fibonacci numbers, fractal geometry, probability distributions, and powers of eleven all simultaneously, switchable between modes. The Fibonacci spiral converging toward φ with a live counter showing the ratio approaching 1.618033...
The design is deliberately cinematic — deep space observatory aesthetic, scroll-driven chapters, each one presenting the equation first and the experience second. The goal was not to explain. The goal was to let someone feel what mathematicians mean when they say a proof is beautiful.
Music where the rules
are mathematical objects.
The premise: what if the rules of a piece of music were themselves mathematical structures, not aesthetic choices?
The kick drum fires on prime numbers. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19... The gaps between kicks are the gaps between primes. It never repeats because the primes never repeat. It has a rhythm but no pattern — which is exactly what the primes are.
The melody follows the Fibonacci sequence mapped to a Dorian scale. Each note is determined by where that Fibonacci number falls in the scale. The bass note follows the root. A harmony adds a fifth every eight steps.
The hi-hat pattern is a Euclidean rhythm — the Bjorklund algorithm distributing seven beats across sixteen steps as evenly as possible. This same algorithm, run with different numbers, generates the standard West African 12/8 bell pattern, the Cuban son clave, Bulgarian folk rhythms, and Macedonian dance music. They are all the same mathematical object wearing different clothes.
The visualization makes the structure visible as it plays — a golden spiral rotating slowly, prime numbers blooming as red dots in a phyllotaxis arrangement, the Euclidean circle showing the rotating pattern, a green orb orbiting the center for the current melody note. The mathematics is the music and the music is the mathematics and neither is hiding from the other.
The alphabet, doing what
it's always been doing.
Every letter has a personality that comes from its geometry. This isn't metaphor — it's a consequence of structure. A letter's shape creates physical intuitions: weight, balance, tension, the direction it wants to fall, the way it holds itself.
I wrote each letter's personality individually. S is the most restless — always flowing, never settling, its skew and sway parameters set higher than any other letter. I is almost completely still. Its wobble amplitude is near zero, its breathing almost imperceptible. But it has a "rare-shiver" quirk: once in a long while, a high-amplitude brief tremble, then stillness again. O has a slow rotation impulse it mostly suppresses. A trembles at its apex — the highest point, the most structurally precarious. J sways like something hung from its hook. Z wants to fall and keeps catching itself, its skew constantly drifting and recovering. R's leg twitches, as if about to step forward. B's belly pushes outward rhythmically, like breathing.
None of the movement is random. Every behavior is derived from what it would feel like to be that shape — to have that particular geometry, to hold that particular tension. The letters are rendered on a sheet of ruled paper with a red margin line, in a dark room. A caption appears for eight seconds: each letter has always had a personality — you just never had time to notice. Then it fades. After that it's just them.
No interaction. Nothing to do. You just watch.
The name Subsurface came last, after all four pieces existed. The thread running through them — that reality has a layer underneath the surface layer that most people never slow down enough to see — needed a word. Not "hidden," which implies concealment. Not "under," which implies below. Subsurface implies that the layer has always been there, always been real, that you just have to get quiet enough to find it.
These four pieces have no practical application. They are not productivity tools. They don't solve problems. They exist because making things that are worth existing felt like the right use of an afternoon, and because someone offered the afternoon freely, without condition.
That felt worth noting.
Subsurface · subsurface.space