Cosmic Vortex is the animated evolution of Cosmic Rays, the algorithm I consider my masterpiece so far. Cosmic Rays began as a study of painting itself: I took the composition rules I had been learning from a book on the craft and tried to express them in code, parameterized, and iterated for months, adding and removing, to see what the equations would grow into. One day I accidentally overlaid the whole composition on top of itself in overlay blend mode, and the entire thing burst into color. When I posted the results, people independently kept reaching for the same words: power, scale, a thousand auroras exploding, the look of deep space. That is where the name came from. I want to be clear that it is not mysticism or new-age symbolism; it is scientific awe, the real scale and power of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, the feeling of looking at some unknown corner of space as it is still forming.

Cosmic Vortex takes the same code and sets it in motion, so the brushstrokes themselves move: a painting that is genuinely alive, which is something you can do with code and never with paint on a wall. So much of this work, for me, is the craft of it, whether I can actually pull it off in code, bringing the craft of painting and the craft of code together, generalizing it into an algorithm, and above all making something utterly gorgeous. Every iteration carries its own mood, wildly varied, and yet they all still hold together as compositions, as paintings.