Last Sunday, I woke up with some kind of creative energy and got into a little bit of a rabbit hole. I took my laptop to a cat café for breakfast, but then thought about the museum experience I had recently, it prompted me to make some art!

The week before I went to the New Taipei Art City Museum for an Exhibition called Interwoven. The first part of the exhibition featured many pieces centered around spider habitats and webs.

There were many webs that were built for weeks and exposed as art pieces, their creators were not in the web anymore, so we only had a look inside their home while they weren’t there.

Before finishing this part of the exhibition, there was one last room, fully enclosed in blackout curtains. There was only one bench, also all dark, in the middle of the room, facing some sort of cutout window. We couldn’t hear anything but a deep hum.

We sat down and watched, in silence. In the window was yet another spider web, but this time it was gently swaying, seemingly animated by a close-by fan. A bright red laser was pointed at the corner of the web and seemingly navigated the web up and down, at the same time, the wind kept making the web move in different directions.

The illumination appeared very random, and we couldn’t stop looking, mesmerized and silent. At some point we had to move to the next part of the exhibition, but to be frank, I really wanted to stay, though I obliged.

Now a week later, I really wanted to see it again, so yet another project was started with p5.js, and off I went to try to recreate something that touched me.

It felt like a beautiful dark space to get lost in and relive some moments that felt meaningful at the time. It was hard to get through some steps, turns out it’s hard to generate a convincing spider-web. I found a way to procedurally generate a distant cousin of that, good enough for now.

Once it was generated I had to figure out how to make a laser evolve through it, make it move, make the web sway, all those steps I witnessed a few days before. The feeling of recreating a lived experience for the sake of remembering it, felt amazing.

A few hours lost in this process, I was at a good stopping point, happy to stop building and just watching it again, blissfully.

I took a small video of the result, here it is.