The background

The lines

The lines drifting behind every page are traced by three short equations that the meteorologist Edward Lorenz wrote down in 1963, while trying to model the weather. Run them and a line starts to loop, and it never stops. It circles one wing, swings to the other, and back again, forever. It never repeats itself, yet it never leaves the shape you see: two wings, which people later called the butterfly.

Lorenz found something unsettling in them. Start two lines a hair’s breadth apart and for a while they travel together, then they split and go entirely different ways. Tiny differences grow until they decide everything. That’s chaos theory, and it’s why nobody can forecast the weather a month ahead.

On this site each group of lines appears somewhere at random, is pulled in until it joins the butterfly, travels as a bundle, then splits apart as those tiny differences grow, before fading away while new lines arrive. Behind them, a slow gradient in the colours of the work swirls into view as you scroll.

The butterfly effect

Click anywhere on the background and you change it. The lines passing near your click break apart and fly off in different directions, then the equations pull them back into the butterfly on paths they would never otherwise have taken. One small touch, and everything that follows is different. That’s the butterfly effect, and you can set it off yourself.

Why it’s here

Rational Chaoticism is the idea that meaningful work happens where order and disorder meet. The Lorenz equations are that idea in its purest form: fixed rules, unpredictable paths. Nothing about them is random, and still you can never say where a line will go next.

I wanted the website to work the same way as the paintings. Most artist sites are a white frame around the work. This one is part of it. The art, the philosophy and the interface tie together, so the site doesn’t just describe Rational Chaoticism, you can play with it.

If you’d rather read without the movement, the pause sign in the bottom-right corner stills it, and your choice is remembered. If your device asks for reduced motion, the background stays still on its own.