BLINK originally grew from our fascination with Baroque vanitas paintings, 17th century still life artworks filled with symbolic objects chosen to remind us of our mortality: hourglasses, skulls, burning candles, butterflies, bubbles. From this inspiration, we distilled the bubble as our object of fascination: the bubble as a symbol of both ephemerality and joy. BLINK is in conversation with our other work, which often plays with time and scale. Here we display the bubble at a large scale, with background streams and fields that reference some of our most well-known examples from The Book of Shaders. The effect is the delicacy of a bubble shown at planetary scale.

The color and speed variation within this series are intentionally chosen to create a wide range of pieces. We are particularly interested in outliers and push the edges here, giving the code freedom to wander through a wide range of outcomes. Some pieces are calm and reflective, like the quiet surface of a pond, or a candle’s flame, while others evoke the energy of a city flying by.

We want to invite people experiencing BLINK into a moment of presence. Viewing the bubble at this scale is both planetary and fleeting: in ictu oculi — in the blink of an eye.