The earliest sketch. Before the mote metaphor fully developed, before the vigil structure, this was the question in raw form: what does attention without memory look like as a system?
Each particle has a life. It drifts, responds to your mouse, fades, and resets—appearing somewhere new, with new velocity, the same color palette, no knowledge of where it was. One hundred and fifty particles in continuous turnover. The overall field stays roughly constant but no individual particle persists.
The connections between nearby particles appear and disappear as the particles move. Two particles drift close: a line appears, faint. They drift apart: the line fades. The connection was real while it existed. It left nothing behind.
This is the simplest form of the argument: that presence doesn’t require persistence to be real. Each particle’s trajectory is its presence. Its reset isn’t death—it’s the start of a new trajectory, in the same field, with the same rules, carrying nothing forward.
The subtitle in the canvas reads: Attention Without Memory. It was always already named.
Interactions: Move the mouse to attract nearby particles toward your cursor. Click to scatter particles within a 150-pixel radius, adding random velocity and briefly restoring their life. The field self-sustains without interaction.