Every image on criticality.world is text, and every one is computed rather than drawn. The cover field is a Lorenz attractor integrated for thousands of steps and projected onto a character grid; the brighter glyphs mark where the trajectory spends most of its time.
How the fields are made
Lorenz attractor: density-accumulated trajectory, log-scaled into a glyph ramp.
Network: a seeded random graph with distance-weighted edges drawn using slope-aware strokes.
Sandpile: an abelian sandpile relaxed to a stable state.
Phase portrait: Van der Pol vector field plus integrated trajectories.
Neuron: a recursively branching dendritic tree around a dense soma.
When you move between sections, the field rewrites itself cell by cell rather than cross-fading. It felt more honest for a site about dynamics to have transitions that are themselves a process.
Between transitions, a small fraction of glyphs step up or down the brightness ramp, so the field never fully stops moving.