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 also show up on the front page. If you prefer a feed reader: there is an RSS feed.
Two 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, cams pluck a music box. It is the closest thing to a harmonograph I have ever built.
Gengarten 64 is a garden 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 just watch. It keeps growing while you are away.
Also repaired: the 2004 time capsule. Galleries 2 to 6 were there all along but could not be reached; now they can. The little eggs in the old music section did not survive the Wayback copy, so they were redrawn.
A 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, a grid of shapes turned by flowing noise. It got new colours, eight shapes and an export that looks exactly like the screen. Schrittgitter is the simple way into FM sound: sixteen tones in a grid and a light that walks across them, step by step. Konsonanzgitter is the big instrument; Schrittgitter is where you start.
Next to pictures and music, the old site had one more idea that never got finished: things you can play with yourself. That part is new.
It started with two synthesizers: Rauschuhr, twelve noise voices arranged like the hours on a clock, and Konsonanzgitter, sixteen FM voices in a grid with one switch that keeps every note consonant with every other. Then three ideas from my notebook became tools of their own: Sternenfeld, a night sky from a seed word; Irrgarten, a labyrinth you can watch being dug; and Taktwerk, a drum machine whose rhythms come from rules instead of hands.
They all run in your browser. No samples, no plugins, and nothing is sent to this server.
The first draft of the new front page showed a Julia set. It looked fine, but it was not mine. My pictures were always closer to strange attractors: one single point, jumping millions of times by the same simple rule, never landing twice in the same place and still never leaving its shape.
So the front page now draws a new attractor on every visit, Lorenz, Clifford, de Jong and others, with the formula and the parameters right next to it. Where the point passes often, light builds up, like a long exposure. If you do not like the one you got, another one → asks for the next.
abstract-arts.de was online from 1999 to 2004: green links, Courier New, the energy background, five years of pictures and music. Then it went quiet, and at some point the domain was gone.
Now it is mine again. The old pages came back from Wayback Machine snapshots. The pictures came back from old hard drives: a small script dug through them disk by disk and collected whatever looked like abstract-arts. In the end every picture of the old galleries turned up again in full size.
The 2004 site lives on as a time capsule, exactly as it was. The switch at the top of the page (2026 | 2004) takes you there and back.