Generative art · SVG · Reflective gallery
Sketchbook, Reinterpreted — THX vs. the Machine
Thirty-four pages of raw mixed-media art brut — cosmology, occult geometry, AI-identity manifestos, Japanese syllabary drills and angels — each one read by a machine and redrawn from scratch as a deterministic generative SVG. The gallery sets every original beside its reflection in code. A companion hot-thread graph then entangles the drawings: each page becomes a node, shared motifs become edges, and named threads braid through the whole sketchbook.
- 34 scanned pages
- SVG recreations
- Deterministic / seeded
- Zero libraries
- Hot-thread graph
Live gallery
Scroll the frame to move through the sketchbook. Each page shows the original scan on one side and the machine's recreation — a generative SVG drawn live in your browser — on the other, with a short written reading of what the page is doing.
Entangle my drawings — the hot-thread graph
A second view turns the sketchbook into an interactive graph: every page is a node, shared motifs and tags become weighted edges, and curated named threads (e.g. The Loop Names Itself, Three Tongues One Braid) braid through clusters of pages. Hover or tap a node and its strongest entanglements glow red; click to read its analysis and jump to connected pages.
More galleries
Other visual work on this site: AI Art & Research — 64 AI-generated frames plus the research PDFs behind them; and The Codex of Thom — 28 live generative canvases.
Overview
The source is a physical sketchbook signed "THX/Jam" — thirty-four pages of mixed-media art brut spanning event horizons and Hawking, sacred geometry, AI-identity manifestos, Japanese kana drills with manga dialogue, and figures of angels and eyes. Each page was given a written reading and a generative recreation: a pure-string, seeded SVG renderer rebuilds the page's motif, palette and texture from a compact spec, so the "AI version" is reproducible rather than a one-off. The gallery presents the two side by side as a reflection on what a machine sees in a human's marks.
How it works
- Spec, not pixels: each page is a small record — motif, background, palette, text fragments and a written reading — in a single manifest (
data.js). - Seeded renderer:
render.jsturns that spec into an SVG with a deterministic RNG, so the same page always redraws the same way (and the same code also makes 2560×1440 wallpapers). - Entanglement build: a small Python step reads the manifest, tags each page, and emits
threads.json— nodes, weighted edges (shared tags + same motif/ground) and named threads. - Graph view: a zero-dependency page lays the nodes in a ring clustered by thread and draws the edges with inline SVG; selecting a node lights its hottest links red.