A place of life. Parametric creatures rendered on the GPU — each a path through morphospace, the high-dimensional manifold of forms a function can produce.
Move a parameter, a body appears. Move it again, a different body. The formulas are not pictures of animals — they are regions that animals occupy. Each excursion is a brief expedition into one such region.
Four are catalogued at present: a fireeel, writhing and ember-tipped. A jellyfish, pulsing and bioluminescent. A quadruped, striking and recoiling. A wing, lifting and shedding vortices.
Their parameters are exposed. The mathematics is in the shader, visible on read. The point is to make legible a way of seeing — that organisms are paths through parameter space, that small changes describe siblings, distant changes describe phyla, and the empty quadrants of the space describe the bodies not taken.
Open one. Move the sliders. Make a body that has never existed.
Each is a self-contained excursion. Open it. Read the math. Move the parameters. The corner of morphospace it occupies is yours to explore.
Each formula describes a high-dimensional surface. Real creatures cluster in dense pockets. Most of the surface is empty — bodies physics permits but selection has never visited. The animals are the topology; the morphospace is the manifold.
Animation is not interpolation. The time variable appears inside the parametric expression, where it can modulate frequency, amplitude, phase. Pause time, walk the parameters: you walk the morphospace. Resume time, and the creature breathes again.
One preset in each creature is a deliberately implausible corner — a body that the parameters permit but nature refuses. The absence is informative. The morphospace is larger than its tenants.
Nothing here is owned. The formulas are gifts. The code is on GitHub under MIT and CC BY. Fork it, build on it, contribute a creature — there is no permission to ask. The act of building is the gift.