abstract-arts.de · pictures, music and small instruments for the browser, made by Holger Erlenwein since 1999 · see the collection · hear the music · play with the tools · about
One single point, jumping millions of times by the same simple rule. It never lands twice in the same place, yet it never leaves its shape. Where it passes often, light builds up, like a long exposure.
The music lives on SoundCloud now, under the name Hal Henrikson. pulvis et umbra sumus.
Eight pieces from the 2004 site, made with AudioMulch. Remastered in 2026 from the old mp3s.
Fractal data turned into notes, 1997 – 2004. Played here by a small synthesizer in your browser, so they sound the same everywhere.
The original site, restored from Wayback Machine snapshots: green links, Courier New, the energy background. Two of its layouts survived, from 2002 and from 2004. It stayed online until 2007.
This page is new as well: a place for news about the site and for thoughts that do not fit anywhere else. Gedankenzettel is German for a scrap of paper you write a thought on so it does not get lost. The newest notes …
2026.10.13toolsTwo pieces that are less instrument and more place. Räderwerk is a drawing machine made of brass: gears drive pen arms, the pens draw on a turning plate, and a chaotic double pendulum tugs at everything. The teeth hum …
2026.10.11newsA personal site from 1999 had a guestbook, so this one has one again. Entries appear after I have read them, and nothing about you is stored except what you write. Two new tools: Rauschraster grew out of a small sketch …
Twelve noise voices sit around a central hub like the hours on a clock. Each one has its own filter, envelope and rhythm, and the colours of the pads follow the sound.
Sixteen FM voices in a 4×4 grid, each triggered by its own LFO against a polyrhythmic master clock. One switch keeps every pitch consonant with every other.
Eight synthesized drums, each on its own ring. The beats come from rules instead of hands: Euclid spreads k hits over n steps, chance rolls dice weighted by the beat, a cellular automaton grows a new generation every bar.
The simple way in: sixteen FM tones in a 4×4 grid, and a light that walks across them step by step. Every field plays a degree of the chosen scale, so nothing clashes.
The inside of a pachinko machine at night. Steel balls drop through pins, bumpers, rotors, belts and switches, and every hit is a note in one shared scale. Build your own board, let it rain, or put three machines side by side.
Sixteen crackle generators in a 4×4 field: dust, vinyl, fire, rain, a Geiger counter, sparks, wood, glass and plain noise. Each voice runs through four effect slots in its own order, and one shared room of air holds them together. Built for crackling, dust and dense spaces.
Six slow voices that swell and fade, each on its own pulse. Two modulators per voice move filter, pitch, space or rhythm, and voices can nudge each other. One harmony switch tunes all six to a shared chord and walks them through a progression, so nothing ever clashes.
A night sky from a seed word: stars with real magnitude and colour statistics, a milky way with dust lanes, nebulae and distant galaxies. Or fly through it.
Watch a labyrinth being dug, passage by passage. Six algorithms, each with its own handwriting, in square or circular form. Then solve it yourself.
A grid of small shapes, each turned and sized by flowing simplex noise. Neighbours pull on each other, so the field moves like a living surface. Truchet arcs join into endless paths.
A workshop of brass gears, pen arms and a turning plate. The gears drive the pens, the pens draw on the plate, and a chaotic double pendulum tugs at everything. Teeth hum, cams pluck a music box, sensors ring when the ink passes.
You steer one laser beam into a field of crystals that grow on moving platforms. Mirrors throw it back, prisms fan white light into a rainbow, pearls scatter it into chaos. Every crystal the light touches rings, and together they make a slowly shifting chord.
Up to five patterns of lines, circles, rays, dots or waves, laid on top of each other. Each one turns, swings or breathes at its own pace, and where they cross, new shapes appear that none of them contains.
A garden of N×N plots in the colours of a Commodore 64. Every plant carries a genome, crosses with its neighbours and mutates, so new species appear on their own. Mostly you watch; now and then you water, prune, cross or breed something in the gene lab.
Marine snow drifts down through dark water. Where it settles, small biotopes grow: glass sponges, tube worms, sea lilies. Glowing colonies find a shared rhythm, shoals pass above, lantern fish hunt the light. And everything they drop turns back into snow.
A swarm of crystal beetles digs its nest underground. You mark tunnels and chambers and say what to gather; the swarm does the rest, carries sand, wood, water and resin, and finds crystal deep in the ground. The queen has wishes, but nothing hurries you.
An expedition through the space of strange attractors, the shapes this site started with. Drift through a map of parameter regions, secure rare finds, fine-tune them and listen to them: x becomes pitch, y becomes timbre, jumps become accents. Missions and new formula families open up as your atlas grows.
An 8-bit landscape you build from castle walls, towers, villages and forests, then send snow, sand or rain through it. Drifts gather in the lee of every wall, dunes wander, and the growing drifts play a calm, harmonic music.
A sunlit coral reef that grows by itself. Eleven growth forms, colours, patterns and glow combine into more than a thousand species; at full moon the corals spawn, cross and mutate, and the reef plays its own growth.
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