Red Ink

Why I made this

Ink, time, and memory

I keep thinking about the way physicist Yasunori Nomura talks about time. Time may be an illusion. That is my rough understanding of what he is saying.

Drop some ink into water. It spreads and mixes. We do not see it gather itself back into the original drop. There are so many more ways for it to be mixed than to stay in that first shape. Entropy increases. I think about that direction of change as the direction of time.

Then I wonder about the whole universe. Is everything already determined, or is it not? Can we go back to the past? Can we ever really know the past? What about the memories I have right now? Are they records of something that really happened, or could they just be an illusion?

These questions feel personal to me. I made Red Ink because I wanted to keep looking at them.

Interaction

A gentle nudge, not a drawing tool

Move or tap inside the field to add a small burst of motion. It does not place a new painted mark; it gives the existing ink a brief push and lets the simulation carry that change forward. The interaction is kept intentionally restrained so that the work remains about motion already present in the field, not about producing a particular image on command.

Made for the browser

Ink in motion

The motion is based on Pavel Dobryakov’s WebGL Fluid Simulation, with a translucent red pigment treatment and a slower pace. It runs locally in your browser. The opening folds are composed before the fluid begins to carry them; each movement then changes the ink.