Concept
During a class field trip to teamLab, visitors could pick up a pencil drawing of a butterfly, flower, or lizard, color it in, and slide it under a scanner. Seconds later, their drawing appeared on the floor, glowing, animated, and moving freely through all the other visitors’ creations. I chose a butterfly and colored it yellow. Watching that specific butterfly appear on the floor and drift between everyone else’s drawings was unlike anything else in the installation. Every other room at teamLab was something you walked through. This one was something you contributed to. The floor felt like a collective painting that no single person made, a shared canvas where hundreds of people’s choices coexisted at once.
That feeling is what I tried to recreate in Assignment 7. The sketch built a glowing, color-shifting floor world populated by wandering creatures: flowers rotating their petals, fish with tails and fins, lizards with wagging tails and four legs, and swirling orbs of orbiting light, all drawn entirely in code with no images. A single yellow butterfly entered from the left edge and drifted organically through the crowd. The background cycled through deep blue, purple, and magenta gradients, with large soft blobs of colored ambient light drifting across the floor to simulate the projected pools of color from the real installation.
It looked alive. But it was passive. Nothing responded to the user. Nothing changed based on what anyone did. The world was the same at the end of a session as it was at the beginning. In my own reflection on that assignment I noted exactly what was missing: flocking behavior, user control, convincing depth, and a sense that the world had memory. This project delivers all of it.
The single butterfly becomes a flock of dozens of mixed creatures, all drawn from the same visual vocabulary as before but now governed by separation, alignment, and cohesion forces. The flock swims directly toward the user’s cursor at all times, so the mouse becomes a living presence in the water rather than a control dial. The floor creatures react to the flock above them. Where the flock lingers, coral grows on the floor through a cellular automata system, pulsing and glowing when the mouse hovers nearby and blooming faster when the mouse stays still. The entire world’s lighting mood shifts continuously between warm dusk and deep night based on how dense and calm the flock is. And the world listens: the microphone picks up sound in the room, and loud sounds scatter the flock like a shockwave while quiet lets the coral bloom undisturbed.
The user is no longer watching. They are conducting.
What Carries Forward
The visual foundation is preserved entirely. The perspective vanishing-point floor, the gradient background that cycles through color palettes, the five ambient light blobs drifting across the scene, and all four creature designs carry forward without modification. The hand-coded creature drawing system, the wobble animation offsets, the bezier butterfly wings, and the soft boundary system that keeps creatures on the floor plane all remain. The additive blending glow technique used for the butterfly trail becomes the basis for the coral bioluminescence and the mood lighting system.
What changes is everything above the visual layer: behavior, interaction, memory, and mood.
The World
The environment is the same floor world, now reframed as a deep-sea scene at dusk. The background gradient runs from warm amber at the top to deep indigo at the bottom and responds to flock behavior rather than cycling on a fixed timer. Perlin noise generates slow-moving god-ray light shafts that cut through the scene each frame, their intensity tied to the current mood state.
The flock occupies the mid-canvas zone. Each agent is randomly assigned one of the existing creature designs, so the flock is visually diverse: a tight cluster might contain spinning flowers next to fish next to swirling orbs, all moving as one body under the same steering forces. They are all the same behavioral system wearing different costumes.
The coral cellular automata grid covers the floor. Each cell tracks how long the flock has spent above it. Sustained presence causes cells to grow through stages from bare floor to young polyp to full coral bloom, drawn using layered colored ellipses with additive blending. Cells the flock abandons slowly regress. The floor is a living record of the session. Coral cells near the mouse cursor pulse with a slow breathing glow, and cells directly beneath a stationary mouse grow noticeably faster.
The mood system reads the average spacing between flock agents every frame and produces a single value between 0 and 1, where 0 is fully calm and dense and 1 is fully scattered and disturbed. This value drives the background palette interpolation, the intensity of the god-ray shafts, the brightness of the ambient blobs, and the prominence of the coral glow. A calm flock means warm amber dominates. A scattered flock means the scene goes dark and the coral becomes the primary light source. The transition is continuous and never snaps abruptly.
Interaction
The project uses four simultaneous input channels. All four work at the same time and all four produce visible consequences in the world.
The mouse is the primary presence in the water. The flock swims toward the cursor continuously, so wherever the mouse moves the school follows. Moving slowly produces a calm, trailing formation. Moving quickly makes the flock chase frantically and spread out. Hovering still over the floor makes the coral beneath pulse and grow faster.
The microphone listens to the room through p5.sound. Quiet input lets the world stay warm and the coral bloom undisturbed. A loud sound, whether a clap, a voice, or music playing nearby, sends a shockwave through the flock, scattering every agent outward and darkening the world toward deep night instantly. Sustained loud input keeps the world in night mode. When the room goes quiet again the flock slowly reforms and the light returns. The amplitude of sound maps directly and continuously to the disturbance force on every agent.
The keyboard gives the user three dramatic state changes. Pressing S fires an explosive scatter force outward from the center of the flock. Pressing C activates a calm force that pulls every agent toward the flock’s center and slows them down, shifting the mood toward dusk. Pressing D forces the world into deep night immediately, making the coral glow at full intensity and dimming everything else to near black. Pressing N drops an instant coral bloom at the current mouse position.
Left-clicking drops a food source that the flock converges on, triggering rapid coral growth and a bioluminescent pulse spreading outward across the floor creatures. Right-clicking releases a disturbance ring that scatters the flock and darkens the world.
Course Concepts
Perlin noise drives the flow field the flock steers through and the god-ray light shafts shifting above. Vector forces govern the seek force pulling agents toward the cursor, the sound-driven scatter shockwave, the food attraction force, and the keyboard scatter and calm impulses. Oscillation animates the creature wobble, the coral pulse rhythm, and the breathing quality of the mood lighting transitions. Particle system techniques handle the bioluminescent glow on the coral and the bloom effects using additive blending, carried directly from the butterfly trail in the previous assignment. Autonomous agent steering powers the independent wander behavior of the floor creatures and their seek response toward the flock. Flocking is the core behavioral engine governing the flock’s separation, alignment, and cohesion. Cellular automata drives the coral growth and regression on the floor grid, with mouse proximity and sound amplitude both feeding into the growth rate.
Every system depends on at least one other. The flocking depends on the flow field. The coral depends on the flock. The mood depends on the flock density. The god-rays depend on the mood. The microphone feeds into the scatter force, the mood, and the coral suppression simultaneously. Nothing runs in isolation.
References
Shiffman, D. (2024). The Nature of Code, v.2. https://natureofcode.com
Reynolds, C. (1999). Steering behaviors for autonomous characters. Game Developers Conference.
Wolfram, S. (2002). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media.
Gardner, M. (1970). Mathematical games: The fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new solitaire game “Life.” Scientific American, 223(4), 120–123.
Assignment 7, teamLab “Color Your World” recreation (Bismark Buernortey Buer): https://decodingnature.nyuadim.com/2026/03/24/buernortey-assignment-7/
Kurokawa, R. — tension and release in generative audiovisual systems.
Hodgin, R. — flocking as visual composition.
p5.sound library documentation. https://p5js.org/reference/p5.sound
AI disclosure: Claude (Anthropic) was used to help develop and articulate the project concept and structure this proposal documentation.