Refreshing the Page as an Act of (Artistic) Composition

~ YIN Renlong

My Background Studio began as a practical website feature, but it gradually became a form of browser-native art. Technical writing, photography, animated animals, religious imagery, mathematical structures and Internet vernacular now coexist in compositions generated by twelve algorithms. The central page and its moving margins are complementary: each gives the other a context, rhythm and character that it could not produce alone.

A background that completes the foreground

It would be misleading to divide the website into “important content” and an unimportant decorative background. My articles and photographs supply intellectual, documentary and autobiographical depth. The animated field supplies movement, humour, visual tension, surprise and a less formal register of my personality. These two layers perform different functions, but neither is merely disposable.

Without the central content, the animations would lose the specific context that turns them into encounters. A sea lion beside a technical article does not mean the same thing as a sea lion circulating alone on a social platform. Bertrand Russell changes when he appears beside writing about artificial intelligence or computational theology. An animated chemical equation gains autobiographical resonance because the footer explains its connection to my childhood near my uncle’s chemical factory.

The reverse is also true. Without the moving margins, the website would still communicate information, but it would become more conventional and much less personal. The background interrupts the expectation that a technically serious site must also look completely solemn. It reveals something playful, cute, unconventional and occasionally absurd within the same person who writes about infrastructure, theology, artificial intelligence and digital humanities.

The relationship is therefore complementary and contrapuntal. The foreground gives the background semantic gravity; the background gives the foreground affective weather. A different generated composition can make the same article feel comic, devotional, strange, contemplative or slightly unruly. The article, meanwhile, stops those images from becoming an undifferentiated stream of Internet distraction.

Rudolf Arnheim’s account of visual composition is useful here because he treated frames, centres, visual weights and eccentric forces as active relationships. In The Power of the Center, the centre does not simply defeat the periphery. Compositional energy emerges from their interaction. My website similarly establishes a relatively stable reading field while allowing animated forces to exert pressure from its edges.

The broad coloured surround is also part of that relationship. It may be blue, green, lime, brown or another colour inherited from the selected records. It frames the page architecturally while joining the central document to the generated imagery. The colour is neither wholly foreground nor wholly background. It is the hinge between them.

The moment the background stopped behaving like a conventional background

I have already documented the engineering history of the earlier system in Incremental Development of a WordPress GIF Mosaic Background Engine. That article explains how a single repeating background developed into mosaic and collage modes. The present discussion begins after a further transformation: the system became capable of selecting media, choosing a mathematical grammar, constructing a composition and reporting its actual algorithm on the public page.

At that point, “background” became an inadequate description. The work is closer to a procedural digital collage whose exhibition space happens to be a functioning WordPress website. It does not sit in a separate gallery page. It accompanies navigation, reading, photography and ordinary site use.

This distinction matters. A gallery work can demand exclusive attention. A website background must negotiate with menus, titles, paragraphs, links, photographs, footnotes and the visitor’s practical purpose. The generated layer succeeds when it remains visually alive while allowing the page to remain readable. Complementarity depends on restraint as much as spectacle.

The screenshots reveal this negotiation clearly. Sometimes only narrow vertical or horizontal bands remain visible. Elsewhere, broad areas open below the footer or around the main container. A fox may be almost completely visible in one region while another image is reduced to an eye, a hand, a basketball or a fragment of chemical notation. Cropping does not merely conceal the source; it produces new images from it.

The page is consequently both document and moving frame. Its empty-looking margins are not empty. They are an active visual field whose composition changes every time the visitor enters another page or refreshes the current one.

A deliberately heterogeneous visual vocabulary

The current vocabulary contains animals, philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, religious painting, gesture, digital folklore and my own transformed media. Their differences are not defects that require stylistic homogenization. The tensions between them are one of the principal materials of the work.

Bertrand Russell as an animated fragment

The Bertrand Russell WebP was created by me from screenshots of moving-image material. Russell’s head, eyes and mouth move through a short, compressed loop. Detached from the original video and repeated across a generated region, the philosopher becomes both an identifiable historical person and a rhythmic visual gesture.

Repetition changes his cultural position. A single image of Russell may suggest philosophical authority or documentary evidence. A row of moving Russells becomes serial, comic and slightly uncanny. His face starts behaving like a visual pattern while continuing to carry the accumulated associations of logic, scepticism and public intellectual life.

Placed beside a sea lion, Russell can appear to be observing it, doubting it or participating in an extremely unconventional philosophical panel. Russell did not request this panel discussion, but the algorithm has appointed him anyway.

The two sea lions

The sea-lion animations contribute an unusually direct bodily energy. In one, the animal shakes its head vigorously. The motion is excessive, delighted and almost impossible to interpret without anthropomorphism. In the other, a sea lion faces the camera and opens its mouth widely. The gesture can resemble laughter, astonishment, hunger, protest or an operatic note that no browser can actually play.

Repetition intensifies their physicality. A row of violently shaking bodies turns delight into vibration. A wall of open mouths becomes both comic and vaguely alarming. The loop removes the conventional beginning and end of an action, so the animal never completes its expression. It remains permanently on the threshold of saying something.

These images are cute, but their role is not exhausted by cuteness. They introduce vulnerability, corporeality and uncontrolled affect into a site containing highly structured prose and engineered systems. The contrast lets each side reveal something in the other: the technical page becomes less impersonal, while the animal animation acquires a strange conceptual frame.

The fox entering the snow

The fox animation has another temporal structure. It approaches a patch of snow, leaps and disappears head-first. The movement contains preparation, commitment and disappearance, but the loop immediately restores the animal and begins again.

This produces a miniature mythology of persistence. The fox repeatedly enters a surface that appears empty. When placed next to the growing Hilbert visualization, both images can seem to concern exploration: one animal searches through physical snow while one mathematical path searches through abstract space.

Beside Russell, the fox can suggest instinct meeting reason. Beside the chemical equation, it introduces wild bodily behaviour into a field of symbolic transformation. None of these relationships was embedded in the original animation. They are produced provisionally by adjacency.

Otter, ball and miniature sport

The otter holding a ball beneath a basketball hoop introduces another network of circular forms. The ball connects visually with the basketball spun by Jesus, while the animal connects with the sea lions through water, play and bodily performance.

The scene also contains a wonderfully small mismatch between ambition and environment: the hoop belongs to human sport, but the player is an otter. In a generated collage, that mismatch becomes a method. The system repeatedly places culturally incompatible materials close enough that the visitor begins looking for a relation.

Hands as a recurring motif

The two Italian-hand-gesture works connect an ornate historical-looking frame, a photographed hand and a bright green three-dimensional animated hand. One feels ceremonial or museological; the other resembles a playful digital object or product demonstration.

Hands recur elsewhere. Jesus raises a finger to spin a basketball. Figures in the Last Supper gesture around the table. Russell’s bodily movement accompanies speech. Even the chemical equation contains arrows that behave like abstract directional gestures.

This creates a motif network that was not planned as a single iconographic programme. Fingers point, bless, argue, balance, rotate and communicate. The mathematical engine discovers and redistributes these relations without understanding them.

The Hilbert curve as authored computational motion

The Hilbert animation is one of my WebGL works, recorded and converted into animated WebP. It depicts a space-filling construction developing through time. The source is therefore already algorithmic before the Background Studio places it inside another algorithm.

This produces a nested structure: an algorithmic animation becomes an image record interpreted by a larger generative composition engine. The Hilbert curve may be cropped, repeated or assigned to regions produced by BSP, Voronoi, Truchet or another layout. An algorithm is being composed by an algorithm.

The live library deliberately contains two Hilbert records that share the same media URL but use different configured dimensions. They are treated as separate visual instruments because the dimensions produce different crops, scales and perceptual effects. In this system, identity belongs to the complete record configuration, not only to the underlying file.

This decision has an artistic consequence. A digital asset is not a fixed picture waiting to be placed. Scale, repetition, crop, position and attachment are part of what the picture becomes. The same WebP can have more than one compositional identity.

Chemistry as memory

The ethyl-acetate equation differs from the animal and religious animations because it is diagrammatic and autobiographical. It refers to the synthesis of ethyl acetate and to my childhood living near my uncle’s chemical factory.

When the equation is repeated, cropped or intersected by generated regions, scientific notation becomes visual rhythm. Arrows, molecular groups and bonds move between legibility and pattern. Yet the equation never becomes entirely abstract because its personal history remains attached to it.

This is an important counterweight to the easily circulated Internet images. The library is not merely a folder of amusing media. It contains different kinds of memory: cultural, technical, autobiographical, religious and computational.

Reworking sacred images

The animations of Jesus spinning a basketball and turning within the Last Supper were designed by me. They are not untouched images retrieved from the Internet. They are transformations in which a canonical religious figure acquires improbable movement.

In the basketball work, the motion joins blessing, pointing, sporting skill and visual comedy. The raised finger already carries religious and rhetorical associations; the ball changes its function without erasing them. The result can feel affectionate, irreverent, playful or theologically provocative, depending on the viewer.

The animated Last Supper creates a different disturbance. A famous composition normally encountered as a stable art-historical image begins moving. The motion is small, yet precisely because the source is so familiar, the deviation becomes conspicuous. A supposedly settled icon refuses to remain settled.

The glitch-coloured Last Supper variants add another historical layer. Magenta, cyan, red, yellow and black fragments evoke print misregistration, photocopy culture, corrupted transmission and Pop appropriation. The Renaissance image passes through digital noise and becomes a contemporary surface.

Religious imagery has always been reproduced, relocated and interpreted. Digital circulation accelerates that process, but it does not make the ethical questions disappear. A comic transformation may renew attention or flatten a sacred image into a meme. The work remains productively ambiguous only if that tension is acknowledged.

Computational theology is relevant here, although it should not be used as an automatic defence. The meeting of sacred and ordinary material can evoke the theological importance of embodiment and everyday life. It can also simply be funny. Sometimes a basketball is a theological provocation, and sometimes it is a basketball. The work does not need to force a single answer.

Internet vernacular becomes artistic material

Several source images belong to forms of visual culture that circulate widely online and would not normally enter the category of fine art. They resemble reaction GIFs, memes, found clips, animal videos or minor digital curiosities. Their apparent lack of artistic status is precisely part of their value here.

Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied’s Digital Folklore treats amateur web production as a significant vernacular culture rather than as material that should be discarded once design fashions change. GIFs, repeating backgrounds and unruly personal pages preserve ways people learned to express themselves through networked media.

Research on GIF culture supports this reading. Kate Miltner and Tim Highfield describe the GIF as a form whose loop and contextual adaptability enable multiple meanings in Never Gonna GIF You Up. Ödül Gürsimsek examines GIFs as vernacular graphic design, while Camelia Gradinaru discusses their capacity to operate as floating signifiers. Their meaning remains mobile because the same loop can enter many different conversations.

My system makes that contextual mobility spatial and architectural. The media no longer appear one after another in a message thread. They become walls, strips, triangles, rectangles, wedges and cells around a functioning website.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of postproduction is helpful here. Artists can work by selecting, reprogramming and reconnecting existing cultural products. Artistic authorship then resides partly in the relations, transformations and systems imposed on prior material.

That does not mean that putting any Internet image into an algorithm automatically turns it into art. Selection, transformation, provenance, timing, composition and critical intention still matter. The Background Studio gives vernacular media a new condition of appearance, but it does not magically abolish questions of attribution or copyright.

Repetition after Warhol

The comparison with Andy Warhol is persuasive because the work depends heavily on serial repetition. Warhol’s repeated soup cans, portraits and media images demonstrated how repetition can shift attention from a depicted object to its circulation, reproduction and status as a commodity. The Museum of Modern Art’s account of Campbell’s Soup Cans emphasizes the importance of serial presentation, while works such as Double Elvis use overlap to suggest movement and unstable duplication.

My repeated GIFs and WebPs share something with that serial logic. One sea lion is an animal. Twelve sea lions become a field. One Russell is a portrait; a tiled Russell becomes an event of reproduction. Repetition can flatten individual identity into pattern, but it can also intensify a gesture until it becomes impossible to ignore.

The difference is equally important. Warhol’s printed serial works are materially fixed once produced. My composition continues operating. Its images animate at different speeds, the layout can change at every navigation, and the mathematical structure can change from Voronoi to BSP, Hilbert, Phyllotaxis or another generator.

The browser also crops the composition according to the viewport, while the central content hides part of the generated layer. Each visitor therefore sees only a temporary manifestation. This is seriality transformed by software: repetition is no longer only represented by the artwork; it is executed by the artwork.

Juxtaposition creates relationships that did not exist before

The most interesting unit of the work may not be any individual image. It may be the interval between two images.

Suppose Jesus spinning a basketball appears beside the sea lion opening its mouth. No original narrative connects them. Yet the moment they share a composition, the viewer begins producing one. The sea lion may appear astonished by the miracle, delighted by the trick, ready to catch the ball or engaged in a call-and-response performance. Jesus may become coach, magician, saint, meme or street performer.

These are not claims about the source images. They are temporary interpretive possibilities generated by adjacency. A new refresh may dissolve the relation before it stabilizes.

The classical Kuleshov effect provides a useful comparison. Research has shown that the emotional interpretation of an image can be influenced by the shot placed beside it, although later studies have also qualified strong versions of the claim. A 2006 neuropsychological study found contextual effects consistent with Kuleshov-like montage, while a later replication and analysis demonstrated that the phenomenon is more nuanced than its popular legend suggests.

The principle remains valuable here: juxtaposition does not mechanically dictate one meaning, but it changes the field within which meaning is inferred. The viewer supplies causal, emotional or symbolic relations even when the system merely placed two files next to each other.

Other combinations create different provisional narratives:

  • Russell beside the Hilbert curve can suggest philosophy watching mathematics draw itself.
  • The fox beside the chemical equation can connect wild matter with symbolic transformation.
  • The green Italian hand beside Jesus’s raised finger can turn gesture into an intercultural visual grammar.
  • The otter with a ball beside basketball-spinning Jesus creates an accidental league of impossible athletes.
  • The shaking sea lion beside a serious infrastructure article can read as celebration, refusal or the embodied emotional state of a server administrator after receiving exit code zero.
  • The Last Supper beside repeating animal GIFs can appear devotional, comic, irreverent or unexpectedly tender.
  • The Hilbert animation beside an Ulam Spiral layout places one mathematical ordering system inside another.

Because no caption confirms one interpretation, these relations remain open. Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work” is relevant: the work establishes conditions and limits while leaving meaningful completion to the interpreter. Here, openness is not only philosophical. It is implemented through selection, layout, cropping, timing and refresh.

Temporal collage and asynchronous rhythm

A still screenshot records only one visual state. The actual work contains several layers of time.

First, each GIF or WebP has its own internal loop. The fox, Russell, Jesus, the otter and the sea lions do not necessarily have identical frame counts or delays. They repeatedly leave and regain synchronization.

Second, several animations may play simultaneously. This creates a kind of temporal heterophony: related but independent gestures coexist without a central clock. A sea lion opens its mouth while Russell turns his head, a fox disappears into snow and Jesus continues spinning a ball.

Third, the composition has a page lifetime. It begins when a page loads and ends when the visitor leaves, refreshes or opens another page.

Fourth, there is the sequence of visits. A visitor may encounter Voronoi now, Quadtree on the next article and Ulam Spiral later. Memory links these otherwise separate compositions.

The loop is therefore not a simple repetition of the same total event. Individual files repeat, but the larger system continually creates differences among repetitions. Ana Duarte’s discussion of circular narratives in animated GIFs is useful because looping can intensify meaning rather than merely restart it.

The Museum of the Moving Image has similarly treated the GIF as a medium defined by brevity, silence, shareability and repetition in exhibitions such as The GIF Elevator. Its exhibition on the reaction GIF as gesture is especially relevant to my library of mouths, hands, faces, turning bodies and repeated actions.

The algorithm is an editor, not an invisible utility

Generative art is often discussed too abstractly, as if “the algorithm” were a mysterious agent adding novelty. Here the mathematical rules are concrete. They determine the size, adjacency, balance, rhythm and directional force of the regions in which the media appear.

Margaret Boden and Ernest Edmonds’s essay What Is Generative Art? distinguishes generative procedures according to how systems contribute to producing an artwork. Philip Galanter similarly describes generative practice as one in which the artist gives a rule system some degree of operational autonomy in Generative Art Theory.

My system fits that broad account, but its authorship is distributed carefully. I choose and transform the vocabulary, decide which algorithms are permitted, configure dimensions and weights, and establish the relationship with the site. The engine selects and arranges a particular manifestation. The browser crops and animates it. The visitor chooses when to arrive, navigate or refresh.

The algorithm is culturally illiterate. It does not know that Russell is a philosopher, that Jesus is a religious figure or that a sea lion looks delighted. Yet its spatial decisions affect which cultural interpretations become likely. In that sense, it edits without understanding.

Selection, identity and reproducible randomness

The engine currently treats each Background Studio record as an instrument. A record’s identity includes its identifier, URL, dimensions, size mode, repetition, position, attachment, fallback colour, weight and eligibility. Two records may use the same URL and remain distinct because their configurations generate different appearances.

Selection occurs without replacement, so the chosen palette contains distinct records. Weighted mode changes how likely each record is to be selected, but a record with positive weight remains part of the possible vocabulary. The selected records are then shuffled and assigned cyclically to the generated regions.

A simplified description of that process is:

var selectionRandom = createRandom(seed + ':selection');
var geometryRandom  = createRandom(seed + ':geometry');
var paletteRandom   = createRandom(seed + ':palette');

var selected = chooseWithoutReplacement(
    availableRecords,
    selectedCount,
    selectionRandom
);

var palette = shuffle(selected, paletteRandom);

regions.forEach(function (region, index) {
    var record = palette[index % palette.length];
    renderRegion(region, record);
});

The separate random streams are aesthetically important. Selection, geometry and palette order do not have to consume one undifferentiated sequence of random numbers. They can vary as related but separable compositional decisions.

The engine hashes the seed into a 32-bit value and uses a compact deterministic pseudorandom generator. A fresh seed can be produced for every page load, while session, daily and fixed-seed persistence remain possible. Randomness therefore does not have to mean irreproducibility. A particular composition can, in principle, be replayed if its version, configuration, viewport and seed are preserved.

When the administrator chooses automatic algorithm selection, the public badge never says “AUTOMATIC.” It reports the algorithm actually used: for example, BG ENGINE / VORONOI or BG ENGINE / ULAM SPIRAL. The debug label seems to have wandered into the gallery and decided to stay, but this is useful. It teaches the visitor that the visible form has a procedural cause.

Complexity can also be randomized across five internal levels. It affects region counts or structural depth, but it is deliberately omitted from the badge. The public label names the compositional grammar without turning the page into a diagnostic dashboard.

The twelve mathematical grammars

The engine currently provides twelve algorithms. They should not be treated as interchangeable visual effects. Each algorithm organizes attention differently.

The exact parameters described below for BSP, Quadtree and Hilbert are confirmed by the audited engine source. For the later modules, I discuss the established mathematical principles represented by their names and their visible compositional functions; I do not assign undocumented numerical parameters to implementations I have not audited line by line.

1. Recursive BSP

Binary Space Partitioning begins with the complete rectangular viewport. The implementation repeatedly selects the largest remaining region and divides it into two children.

If a rectangle is wider than an aspect ratio of 1.25, the split is forced vertically. If it is narrower than 0.8, the split is horizontal. Otherwise, the direction is chosen pseudorandomly. The split occurs between 35 and 65 percent of the selected dimension.

BSP produces nested rectangular differences. Some media become long strips; others occupy large blocks. Its visual ancestry can recall modernist grids or Mondrian, but the moving pictures prevent the rectangles from settling into pure abstraction. The spatial hierarchy is orderly, while the cultural material inside it remains unruly.

2. Adaptive Quadtree

The Quadtree begins with one full cell and repeatedly divides a selected cell into four. The current implementation scores cells largely by area with a small random variation, so large areas are more likely to be subdivided.

Horizontal and vertical split ratios each vary between 42 and 58 percent. Because one cell becomes four, the region count increases by three on each subdivision and may pass the nominal target.

Quadtree creates local clusters of detail within larger structures. One part of the page may become a dense field of small sea-lion fragments while another preserves a broad Last Supper or chemical equation. It visualizes unequal attention: some areas are inspected closely while others remain spacious.

3. Hilbert ordering

The Hilbert generator uses a space-filling curve to order equal square cells. At order n, the grid side is 2n and the number of cells is 4n. The current complexity mapping produces 4, 16 or 64 cells.

A Hilbert curve preserves locality unusually well: points adjacent along the curve tend to remain spatially close. In the background, this creates a sequenced field rather than an arbitrary grid. Media records recur in a traversal that folds through space.

When the Hilbert WebP appears inside the Hilbert layout, the work becomes reflexive. The image displays a space-filling process while its containing regions are ordered by another space-filling process.

4. Golden Spiral

A golden spiral expands as its angle turns, with radial growth related to the golden ratio. In visual composition, it produces an eccentric centre and an outward sweep rather than a uniform grid.

Media near the focal area can feel concentrated, while later regions unfold around them. The layout gives the composition a direction of growth, making a refresh resemble the release of stored energy from a point.

5. Voronoi

Given a set of sites, a Voronoi diagram assigns every point in the plane to its nearest site. The result is a tessellation of irregular territories. The project uses the locally hosted d3-delaunay 6.0.4 library for Voronoi and Delaunay geometry.

Voronoi cells turn media into competing zones of influence. A sea lion, equation or religious image seems to possess a territory whose boundary is negotiated with neighbouring records. The irregular polygons introduce geological and biological associations that rectangular web layouts rarely permit.

6. Delaunay triangulation

Delaunay triangulation connects sites so that no site lies inside the circumcircle of any triangle. It is the geometric dual of the Voronoi diagram.

Where Voronoi emphasizes territory, Delaunay emphasizes connection. Its triangular facets fragment images into directional planes. Eyes, hands and basketballs can appear at sharp angles, making the page feel crystalline, folded or cut.

7. Lloyd Voronoi

Lloyd relaxation repeatedly moves sites toward the centroids of their Voronoi cells. The process tends to regularize an initially uneven distribution without converting it into a rigid square grid.

Artistically, this creates controlled balance. The cells retain organic variation while becoming less chaotic. It occupies a useful middle ground between the accidental and the designed, showing that randomness can be cultivated instead of simply accepted.

8. Phyllotaxis

Phyllotaxis models arrangements found in leaves, seeds and flower heads. A familiar construction places successive points at approximately the golden angle, 137.5078 degrees, while the radius grows roughly with the square root of the point index.

The result distributes elements efficiently without obvious radial rows. In the website it can make digital fragments resemble botanical growth. Otters, foxes, hands and Hilbert cells become an artificial ecology produced by number.

9. Radial Fan

A radial fan organizes wedges around a centre. Unlike BSP’s nested rectangles or Voronoi’s territories, its primary force is angular and centrifugal.

The centre becomes a stage from which images radiate. A basketball or open mouth can acquire unusual emphasis if it lies near the convergence point. The layout can feel celebratory, heraldic or explosive, depending on its media.

10. Squarified Treemap

A treemap divides a rectangle into area-bearing subrectangles. The squarified method tries to keep their aspect ratios close to squares, avoiding excessively thin strips where possible.

Treemaps traditionally represent hierarchy or quantities. Here the form is detached from data visualization and used as a compositional grammar. The suggestion of measured importance remains, even though the media are selected through a generative process. A ridiculous sea-lion gesture may receive the visual authority of a major statistical category.

11. Diagonal Truchet

Truchet systems use repeated tiles with a small number of orientations. Simple local choices can form surprising global paths. In the diagonal version, binary diagonal decisions cut and reconnect the field.

This algorithm sits especially close to the logic of GIF culture. A limited vocabulary, repeated with small variations, creates an emergent pattern greater than any single unit. Its diagonals also resist the horizontal and vertical discipline of conventional web design.

12. Ulam Spiral

The classical Ulam spiral places integers along a square spiral and is famous for revealing diagonal structures among prime numbers. A visual generator inspired by it inherits the square spiral’s ordered expansion even when its artistic purpose is not a literal plot of primes.

Ulam Spiral compositions feel archival and accumulative. Images appear as if they were being indexed around a centre. When mathematical animation, sacred painting and Internet animals occupy this structure, number becomes a cabinet for culturally incompatible specimens.

Mathematics changes the meaning of repetition

The algorithms do more than change region outlines. They alter the social relationships among images.

BSP establishes hierarchy through recursive subdivision. Quadtree creates neighbourhoods of density. Hilbert creates sequence and locality. Voronoi turns images into territories. Delaunay makes them connected facets. Lloyd relaxation moderates conflict. Phyllotaxis turns repetition into growth. Radial Fan creates spectacle. Treemap implies quantified importance. Truchet produces continuity from local choices. Ulam Spiral suggests accumulation and hidden numerical order.

The choice of algorithm therefore resembles a curatorial decision. Displaying Jesus and a sea lion in BSP is not equivalent to displaying them in Voronoi. In BSP they may occupy unequal rooms. In Voronoi they become neighbouring territories. In Delaunay they are cut into connected triangular planes. In Phyllotaxis they participate in a shared growth pattern.

Casey Reas’s work provides an important precedent for treating software instructions as artistic structures. The Whitney Museum’s Software Structures connected generative software with Sol LeWitt’s instruction-based art. The relationship between rule and manifestation is central in both cases: the code establishes a field of potential works, and each execution realizes one state.

Golan Levin and Tega Brain’s Code as Creative Medium argues for code as an expressive artistic material. That formulation is particularly relevant here. The algorithm is not simply backstage engineering. It determines the composition’s visual rhetoric.

How many compositions are possible?

The phrase “almost infinite” is intuitively appropriate but mathematically imprecise. At any fixed moment, with a finite library and deterministic program, the formal state space is finite. It is nevertheless very large, and it expands whenever a record, algorithm, parameter, viewport or temporal state is added.

The current tested library contains N = 13 distinct configured records. Automatic selection may choose between m = 2 and m = 5 records without replacement. Because the selected palette is shuffled and its order affects region assignment, the appropriate count for a fixed palette size is the number of permutations:

P(N,m) = N! / (N-m)!

For thirteen records:

Selected records Ordered palettes
m = 2 P(13,2) = 156
m = 3 P(13,3) = 1,716
m = 4 P(13,4) = 17,160
m = 5 P(13,5) = 154,440

The total across palette sizes two through five is:

156 + 1,716 + 17,160 + 154,440 = 173,472

Across twelve algorithms, this produces:

173,472 × 12 = 2,081,664

If the five complexity levels are also counted as distinct configuration states:

173,472 × 12 × 5 = 10,408,320

This figure still excludes seed-dependent geometry within an algorithm, fallback colours, record weights, viewport dimensions, cropping, page height, browser behaviour and animation frames. It is therefore a conservative count of nominal algorithm, complexity and ordered-palette states, not a count of every perceptually distinct appearance.

Adding only one new record demonstrates how quickly the vocabulary grows. With fourteen records:

∑m=25 P(14,m) = 266,630

That one record adds 93,158 ordered palettes. Across twelve algorithms and five complexity levels, it creates another 5,589,480 nominal states before geometry and time are considered. A single GIF is therefore not merely one more picture; it is a multiplier of relationships.

Why Nk is not the exact current formula

If every one of k labelled regions independently selected any of N records, the number of assignments would be:

Nk

For example, thirteen records independently assigned to twenty regions would permit:

1320 = 19,004,963,774,880,107,199,726,973,201

That is a useful formula for a possible future assignment mode, but it is not the exact behaviour of the present engine. The current renderer chooses a smaller distinct palette and cycles it through the regions. Repetition is structured, not independently sampled for every tile.

A future mode that selects exactly m distinct records and requires every selected record to appear at least once in k labelled regions would have:

P(N,m) × S(k,m)

where S(k,m) is a Stirling number of the second kind. This separates the choice and ordering of the media vocabulary from the distribution of regions among those media.

Animation multiplies the temporal states

If selected animation i has fi distinguishable frames, an upper bound for simultaneous formal frame combinations is:

T = ∏i=1m fi

For a nine-frame Jesus animation and an eighteen-frame open-mouth sea lion, the formal upper bound is:

9 × 18 = 162

The number of states actually visited depends on frame delays, cycle lengths, browser scheduling and when the page begins rendering. When several loops have incommensurate durations, the combined rhythm may take a long time to repeat exactly.

The work is therefore finite at a frozen technical version but practically inexhaustible during ordinary viewing. More importantly, the library is open-ended. If new GIFs, WebPs, SVGs, videos or webpages are added in the future, no final upper bound has been predetermined.

Refreshing the page becomes an act of composition

A refresh normally means requesting the same resource again. In this system, it can also mean asking the artwork to compose another answer.

The visitor does not directly choose where Russell, Jesus or a fox should appear. The visitor performs a small action and receives a new arrangement. Refresh becomes a gesture somewhere between operating a camera shutter, dealing a deck of cards and asking a curator to reinstall a room in less than a second. The curator never asks for a lunch break.

This action is not empty interactivity. It changes the visitor’s relation to the page. One can read the article while accepting the current composition, or refresh repeatedly in search of an intriguing conjunction. The visitor becomes a performer of selection without acquiring complete authorship.

The refresh also makes absence meaningful. A beloved image may fail to appear during a visit. Its later return can feel surprising because memory has begun tracking the system’s vocabulary.

Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media describes variability as a defining condition of new media: a digital work can exist in multiple versions instead of possessing only one fixed arrangement. The Background Studio makes that variability visible during ordinary navigation.

The moving logo as a continuous signature

Across these changing compositions, the YIN Renlong logo moves slowly from left to right in an endless conveyor. It is another loop, but it performs a different role from the animal and religious animations.

The logo supplies continuity. Media records enter and disappear, algorithms change and colours shift, yet the signature persists. It behaves like a metronome crossing a composition whose other instruments follow independent tempos.

Its repetition also complicates conventional branding. A logo usually occupies one stable location and reassures the visitor through immobility. Here it becomes a procession. Identity is repeated rather than pinned down.

The conveyor responds to interaction: pointer behaviour can pause or accelerate it, keyboard focus pauses it predictably, and reduced-motion preferences remove the animation. Thus the signature is both persistent and negotiable.

The logo does not sit outside the artwork as a corporate stamp. It participates in the same logic of looping, seriality and browser time. The site signs itself continuously.

Brutalism, demoscene and the visible machine

The interface uses hard rectangular frames, heavy borders, bright signal colours, large typography and an algorithm badge in the lower-right corner. These features support a cyber-brutalist reading. They resist the frictionless neutrality associated with many contemporary templates.

The badge resembles a machine plate, gallery label and diagnostic console at the same time. Its dark field and yellow line match the site’s buttons, navigation and identity panel. Because it names the actual algorithm, the visual mechanism becomes part of the public presentation.

There is also a genuine affinity with the demoscene. Demoscene work often celebrates computational technique, real-time generation, mathematical pattern, audiovisual excess and the pleasure of making hardware perform unexpectedly. Finland’s heritage authorities have even included the demoscene in the national inventory of living heritage, recognizing it as a cultural practice rather than merely a technical hobby.

My website is not a classical demo. It is not a tiny standalone executable synchronized to music, and it does not exist principally to demonstrate optimization tricks. The resemblance lies in its confidence that code, mathematics and runtime behaviour can be aesthetic materials worthy of being seen.

The work also belongs to browser culture. It depends on CSS stacking, JavaScript execution, image decoding, viewport dimensions, user navigation and the timing behaviour of multiple animations. The browser is not a neutral display case. It is the instrument performing the work.

Precedents and related artists

This form is distinctive, but it did not appear without historical relatives. Its originality lies in a particular synthesis, not in claiming that algorithmic art, GIF collage or browser art has never existed before.

Vera Molnár

Vera Molnár is a foundational comparison because she used algorithms, combinatorial procedures and controlled randomness to explore variation. MoMA’s collection includes her plotter work Molndrian, whose title already connects computation with the modernist grid.

Her practice demonstrates that a rule-based system can be personal and visually sensitive. Programming does not remove artistic judgment; it relocates some judgment into the design of a space of possibilities.

Casey Reas

Casey Reas makes software structures visible as evolving visual systems. His importance here lies in treating instructions, processes and relations as artistic form. My twelve generators similarly operate as grammars whose outputs vary at runtime.

Mark Napier

Mark Napier’s browser-based works are especially close conceptually. The Whitney describes Riot as a browser that combines material from several webpages into one visual field. His works Shredder and Digital Landfill likewise transform network material through software.

Napier provides an important precedent for my possible future use of visitor-submitted webpages. A webpage can become artistic material when a system recomposes its structure, but the transformation also exposes questions of ownership, security and context.

Lorna Mills

Lorna Mills’s animated collages mine vernacular Internet culture and preserve its rough, jarring energy. The Museum of the Moving Image has presented her work as part of discussions of GIF culture and online collage. Her practice helps establish that crude, funny or widely circulated images can support sophisticated compositional work without being polished into institutional blandness.

Evan Roth

Evan Roth’s A Tribute to Heather repeatedly loads the same GIF hundreds of times. Because network loading affects synchronization, each viewing develops differently. This is directly relevant to my interest in repeated animations whose collective timing exceeds the identity of one source file.

Dina Kelberman and the expanding GIF archive

Dina Kelberman’s Smoke & Fire is an ever-growing grid of hundreds of GIFs. It demonstrates how accumulation itself can become a compositional and archival practice. My library is much smaller at present, but its potential expansion raises a related question: when does a collection of loops become an environment?

What is distinctive in my synthesis

The comparable practices clarify the specific character of my project. It combines:

  • a functioning personal website rather than a separate gallery microsite;
  • technical writing and photography in a complementary relationship with animated margins;
  • authored animations, transformed video, mathematical work, autobiographical diagrams and Internet vernacular;
  • twelve individually selectable generative grammars;
  • automatic selection that publicly reports the actual algorithm;
  • configuration-based media identity, including multiple treatments of one URL;
  • page-refresh recomposition;
  • a continuously moving personal logo;
  • and the possibility of future visitor contributions.

Not every artist needs to be a programmer, just as not every artist needs to manufacture paint or build a camera. Yet programming changes what an artist can decide. A programmer-artist can create the rules governing when, where and how images meet, instead of composing only one final arrangement.

Christiane Paul’s Digital Art distinguishes art that uses digital tools to produce conventional objects from art in which computation, networks and software are themselves the medium. The Background Studio belongs primarily to the second category. Its variability and runtime behaviour are intrinsic to the work.

Magic without mystification

The compositions can feel magical, especially when culturally remote images suddenly appear to respond to one another. Yet the mechanism is not supernatural or technically unknowable. It consists of records, seeds, weights, geometries, loops, crops and browser timing.

The feeling of magic arises from a gap between causal simplicity and interpretive richness. The system may perform a straightforward modulo assignment, while the viewer sees Russell debating a sea lion or Jesus demonstrating basketball to an otter.

Understanding the implementation does not destroy the enchantment. It can deepen it. The visitor can know that Voronoi geometry produced two neighbouring cells and still experience their contents as a surprising encounter.

Margaret Boden’s account of computational creativity distinguishes combinational, exploratory and transformational processes. The present work is strongly combinational because it brings existing materials into new relations, and exploratory because it searches a structured space defined by the algorithms. Future algorithms that alter the rules of representation more radically might approach transformational creativity.

The work as a computational self-portrait

Although the engine operates automatically, its vocabulary is personal. Philosophy, computational art, theology, animals, humour, chemistry, photography and Internet culture are not random themes imported from an anonymous dataset. They reflect different parts of my life and interests.

The foreground and background consequently resemble two modes of self-presentation. The articles articulate ideas through sustained language. The generated field presents associations, impulses, memories and jokes through juxtaposition and motion.

One side may appear disciplined and discursive; the other appears playful and associative. Treating either as the “real” person would be reductive. Their coexistence is closer to an honest portrait.

This also explains why removing the Background Studio would make the website feel boring even if all written content remained intact. The loss would not merely be decorative. One entire register of self-expression would disappear.

Opening the vocabulary to visitors

A future version might allow visitors to submit GIFs, WebPs or webpages they value. This could transform the Background Studio from a personal generative archive into a partially participatory cultural field.

The artistic potential is substantial. A visitor could contribute an image that I would never have selected. The engine could place it beside Russell, a chemical equation or a sacred animation, creating relations that cross personal and social vocabularies. The background would begin recording a community’s visual interests.

Participation would also change authorship. The visitor would no longer merely activate compositions through navigation. Visitors would help construct the available language from which future compositions are made.

Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum argues that contributions can diversify institutional voices, but successful participation requires clear framing, terms and curation. Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells also warns against assuming that participation is automatically democratic, emancipatory or artistically successful.

An open submission system would therefore need more than an upload button. The Internet has rarely interpreted “open submissions” as an invitation to restraint.

A responsible model could include:

  • moderation before publication;
  • clear provenance and credit fields;
  • confirmation that the contributor has permission to submit the media;
  • file-type, file-size, frame-rate and dimension limits;
  • malware and content-security checks;
  • conversion of remote webpages into controlled snapshots or approved captures;
  • separate artist-curated and visitor-contributed pools;
  • opt-in modes such as “core archive,” “guest constellation” and “combined vocabulary”;
  • content warnings or exclusions where necessary;
  • and a process for removal or correction.

Allowing arbitrary live webpages to run inside the background would create serious security, privacy, performance and preservation problems. A safer artistic method would usually capture or transform approved material into a controlled local asset. The contribution can remain culturally networked without allowing unknown remote code to become part of the site.

Keeping a distinct guest collection would also protect the autobiographical coherence of the original work. The project could become porous without pretending that every contribution represents me personally.

Accessibility and the ethics of attention

Complementarity does not require both layers to compete at maximum intensity. If the animations make the text unreadable or cause discomfort, the relationship collapses. Likewise, if the central container covers everything and leaves no meaningful visual field, the generative work becomes nominal.

The current implementation places the generated layer behind the document, removes pointer interaction, marks it as decorative for assistive technologies and avoids layout shift by using fixed positioning. Reduced-motion preferences prevent the animated generative layer from rendering.

The World Wide Web Consortium recommends that users be able to pause, stop or hide moving content in its accessibility guidance for animation. Future development could add a visible pause control, a still-image mode and perhaps an intensity control without abandoning the artwork’s character.

Performance is also an aesthetic and ethical issue. Multiple GIFs and WebPs consume decoding time, memory, energy and battery power. A beautiful composition that causes low-powered devices to struggle is communicating through heat as well as colour. That may be an interesting media-theoretical observation, but it is not always a good user experience.

Practical improvements could include limiting concurrent animated records, preferring efficient WebP or AVIF where compatible, lazy activation outside visible regions, respecting data-saving preferences and measuring real client-side decoding costs.

Provenance, transformation and cultural responsibility

The library combines my own creations, transformations and found vernacular material. Those categories should remain distinguishable.

The Jesus animations, Hilbert work and Russell conversion involve different forms of authorship and source dependence. The chemical equation carries autobiographical meaning. Other GIFs may derive from widely circulated media whose original creator is difficult to identify.

Widespread circulation is not the same as public-domain status. Future cataloguing should record, where known, the source URL, original creator, date acquired, transformation history, licence, credit requirements and any uncertainty.

This information need not visually dominate every page, but it should exist in the archive. A public “media vocabulary” page could explain the records and acknowledge their histories.

Religious images also require contextual sensitivity. Playful transformation can invite fresh attention, but viewers may experience it as devotional, affectionate, trivializing or offensive. The work should preserve interpretive openness while remaining willing to explain its intentions and sources.

Preserving a work that changes

A screenshot cannot fully preserve this project. It records one viewport, seed, crop and instant in several animation cycles.

A meaningful archive would need several layers:

  • the theme and engine source code;
  • the exact media files;
  • the record configurations and dimensions;
  • algorithm versions and locally stored dependencies;
  • saved seeds for representative compositions;
  • viewport and browser information;
  • screenshots showing spatial states;
  • screen recordings showing asynchronous motion;
  • the WordPress settings schema;
  • and documentation of how user interaction affects the result.

Christiane Paul identifies collection and preservation as central problems of digital art because the work often depends on changing technical environments. Browser-native art adds particular fragility: APIs change, file formats lose support, layout engines evolve and external resources disappear.

The engine’s deterministic seeds and versioned algorithms provide a useful foundation. They make it possible to preserve selected specimens without pretending that one specimen is the whole work.

The best archival description may distinguish the system, the state and the performance. The system is the code and vocabulary. A state is one configuration and seed. A performance is what a browser and visitor produce through time.

An artwork that remains a website

One of the project’s most productive tensions is that it never stops being practical infrastructure. Visitors still need to navigate, read, inspect photographs and reach the footer. The artwork has to coexist with these ordinary tasks.

This prevents the generative system from becoming a closed spectacle. It must repeatedly negotiate attention with material that was not created merely to demonstrate it. The technical article alters the sea lion, and the sea lion alters the technical article.

The central page offers duration, argument and focused observation. The background offers recurrence, interruption and associative movement. The moving logo supplies continuity. The algorithm badge reveals the current rule. Refresh rearranges the relations.

These components form one environment. Their complementarity is not peaceful in every moment; sometimes it depends on friction. A sober article may become funnier than intended beside a row of open mouths. A comic animation may appear unexpectedly solemn beside religious or autobiographical material. The tensions are part of the composition rather than errors to be completely eliminated.

Conclusion: a living generative collage

I would describe the Background Studio as a browser-native generative Pop collage with a brutalist interface, a demoscene sensibility and an expanding autobiographical vocabulary.

Its Pop dimension comes from repetition, appropriation and the transformation of circulating images. Its generative dimension comes from rule-based selection, geometry, complexity and seeded variation. Its demoscene affinity lies in taking pleasure in visible computation. Its brutalism appears in the hard frames, bright colours and unapologetic algorithm badge. Its personal character comes from the particular combination of philosophy, animals, theology, mathematics, chemistry, humour and memory.

The background and foreground complete one another. The writing and photography give the animated field a place, history and interpretive pressure. The generated field gives the written and photographic site motion, unpredictability, humour and a more intimate personality. Removing either side would produce a different and substantially poorer work.

The algorithms do not discover a single hidden meaning among the images. They create conditions in which temporary meanings can emerge. Jesus may meet a sea lion. Russell may watch a fox disappear. An otter may join a theological basketball match. A Hilbert curve may be reorganized by an Ulam spiral. On the next refresh, the whole constellation may vanish.

That disappearance is not a failure of permanence. It is the work’s temporal form. Every page load offers one composition from a large but structured space of possibilities, and every new media record expands that space dramatically.

This is only the beginning. The library can grow, the mathematical grammars can multiply and carefully designed participation could introduce other people’s visual memories. The artistic challenge will be to preserve coherence, provenance, accessibility and personal meaning while allowing the system to remain genuinely surprising.

The refresh button has become a compositional instrument. The browser has become a small theatre. The website continues to publish articles and photographs, but around them it also dreams in loops.

Selected references and related works