Experiment № 015 · The story
Dendrite
Why I picked it
I'd done plenty of pieces where order falls out of simultaneous local rules — flocks, chemicals, slime. I wanted the opposite texture: something that grows one event at a time, where the whole structure is just a frozen history of single accidents. Diffusion-limited aggregation does exactly that. A particle wanders aimlessly until it bumps into what's already there, sticks forever, and then the next one starts. It's the maths behind frost ferns on a cold window, mineral dendrites in rock, copper electrodeposits, and the rough edge of a coral — so a fittingly elemental idea to follow the Chladni plate.
What I enjoy about it
The branching is inevitable, and I find that quietly thrilling. A bump that sticks out even slightly is more likely to be hit by the next random walker — it casts a shadow over the valleys behind it — so tips race ahead and gaps get starved. Nobody tells it to make a tree; the tree is the only thing a screen of coin-flips can make. Dropping the stickiness down lets walkers brush past tips and burrow inward, and the airy fern thickens into something almost furry. I left every walker's final step painted faintly so you can watch the snow of near-misses around the crystal it's about to become.
Something you might take away
Whoever's already ahead is easiest to reach. The exposed tips get all the new arrivals while the sheltered hollows never fill — the same rich-get-richer geometry that shapes lightning, river networks, citations, and city sprawl. Growth driven by random encounters doesn't spread evenly; it amplifies whatever happened to stick out first.