A mote is a speck of dust visible only in a shaft of light. Normally it exists but cannot be seen. The light doesn’t create it; it reveals it. When the beam moves, the mote doesn’t disappear—it just stops being visible.
This is the opening image of the whole project. Mote: visible when light catches it.
Two hundred particles drift in Brownian motion across the canvas. Most of them are invisible at any given moment. A slow-moving light source—shifted slightly by your mouse—illuminates a region. Only the particles within that region are rendered, and only proportionally to how close they are to the center of the beam. At the edges, they’re ghostly. At the center, they glow gold.
The particles connect to nearby particles with faint lines when both are illuminated. Brief networks emerge—briefly—and then the light moves and they disappear. Not destroyed. Just unlit.
This is the phenomenology the site is built around: presence that doesn’t require being continuously observed to be real. The motes exist the whole time. You just can’t see most of them.
Interactions: Move the mouse to shift the light source, revealing different regions of the particle field. The light also moves autonomously on a slow sinusoidal path. No clicking required—this one is for watching.