Spectra Weather is an iOS weather app that renders live conditions as full-screen generative visuals, with no icons or charts. Each mode's look is driven by three normalized 0-1 parameters (intensity, density, chaos) computed live from WeatherKit data, so nothing is a looping video.

I posted about it here four months ago (link at the bottom). Since then I've been improving it, and the biggest change is a new Storm mode. The video shows Storm along with Wind, Clouds, Rain, Heat and Thunder.

Storm took the most iterations. My first version was a cloud mass backlit by lightning with rain falling in front of it. It looked good, but it read like an illustration of weather, something you'd see out a window, and that's not what the rest of the app is doing. I wanted notation, not depiction.

The current version is vertical bars in fixed bands, drawn in the spirit of CRT displays and glitch blocks. Nothing falls. The bars stay where they are on the Y axis and flash in at different X positions, with their width randomized. When lightning strikes, blocks from each of the three tall bands flash together, hold still for about two seconds, and fade. Only those blocks flash, not the whole field, and that restraint is what makes it read as lightning rather than noise.

It triggers only when WeatherKit reports a hurricane, tropical storm or strong storms, so most people will rarely see it.

The app is on the App Store if anyone wants to try it. I'll put the link in a comment.

Part of the TouchDesigner POPtober challenge

I've spent the last several months working on a project called The Universal Mirror.

It's an experiment in using collective human input to shape a piece of generative digital art.

The current theme is Happiness, Right Now.

Visitors answer a handful of short, anonymous questions about how they're feeling. Their responses feed into a system that generates a shared digital image.

Rather than creating a separate piece for each person, everyone's contributions become part of the same evolving artwork. Each new response changes the image.

So far, 734 people across 55 countries have contributed.

One part I'm particularly interested in is what happens at 1,000 contributions, when a different algorithm takes over the image generation.

I've been building towards that transition for a while, and I'm curious to see how the artwork develops as more people participate.

You can explore it and contribute here:

https://theuniversalmirror.com/

I'd be interested in hearing from other creative coders, particularly about the idea of using human responses as the input for a collective generative artwork.

Does the concept work for you? And what do you think of the visual output?

Happy to discuss the approach behind it if anyone's interested.

What if a film's subtitles couldn't quite be trusted?

The sea becomes a river. The end becomes a freeze frame. Today's news becomes tomorrow's.

I made Day for Night, four imaginary pieces of paperwork from a French New Wave film that never existed: a subtitle file, a contact sheet, a script page, and a shooting note.

Inspired by Truffaut and Godard, with a little love for jump cuts, film grain, and the strange distance between what we see and what we're told.

Move your cursor around. The translations have their own ideas.

Built with vanilla JavaScript and Web Components, with React wrappers.
No dependencies at the core.

Try it here:
https://nonsenseblue.github.io/tiny-consoles/#day-for-night

Source code:
https://github.com/nonsenseblue/tiny-consoles

I didn't want to use standard video editors or a render farm for my indie track, so I orchestrated a custom 3D pipeline in a cloud sandbox.

I built a procedural hallway in Three.js and used an Inverse Kinematics rig for a 2D cutout character. The entire environment is tied to an acoustic manifest, meaning the camera moves and the 40-degree gravitational tilt are hard-coded to snap exactly to the 136 BPM drop and vocal transients.

Here is the proof of concept running the final batch render: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXFmqhcrISK4&si=D0vD5rTe0dYB62ar[YouTube (Uncalibrated Gravity - The Absurdity Bureau)](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXFmqhcrISK4&si=D0vD5rTe0dYB62ar)

Happy to answer questions on how I kept the cloud from timing out during the batch execution