Molnár's Interruptions

Molnar translates the logic of Vera Molnár's Interruptions into a live browser field. Move the pointer across the grid and the rectangles begin to tilt, compress, and drift out of line.

Vera Molnár's Interruptions series matters because it shows how little an algorithm needs to do before order becomes expressive. The Morgan Library describes one 1968 drawing as one of the first works she produced with a computer, made from a program she wrote onto punch cards and printed on a plotter, with randomness deliberately included so that gaps would appear in the composition. The V&A's record places the 1969 plotter drawings among her earliest computer-generated images and notes that she kept slightly modifying the algorithm from one work to the next, using iteration to explore a family of possible results instead of settling on a single finished arrangement.

What makes that history feel contemporary is that Molnár had already been thinking this way before the machine time arrived. In the V&A essay on her idea of the machine imaginaire, the point is not that the computer suddenly made her systematic; it is that she had already been using grids, constraints, permutations, and self-imposed procedures by hand, then carried that logic into code. This browser sketch is strongest when read in that light. It is not a facsimile of a single historical sheet. It is a small live argument about Molnár's method: start with a disciplined field, give deviation a narrow opening, and let the image discover what kind of disorder the rule can bear.

The core of the piece is almost absurdly compact. Every rectangle begins with a stable position, a slight base angle, and a random seed. Then the pointer acts as a local disturbance field, raising the amount of deviation only for cells close enough to feel it:

const dx = mx - g.x, dy = my - g.y;
const dist = Math.sqrt(dx*dx + dy*dy);
const influence = Math.max(0, 1 - dist / radius);
const disruption = influence * influence;
const angle = g.baseAngle + disruption * (g.seed - 0.5) * Math.PI * 1.5;
const scale = 1 - disruption * 0.4 * g.seed;

That disruption value does nearly all the aesthetic work. Far from the pointer it falls to zero and the grid resumes its composure. Near the pointer it rises quadratically, so the deformation comes on softly and then suddenly feels decisive. Molnár's historical plotter drawings often made interruption visible through missing segments and carefully controlled breaks. This version translates interruption into motion instead of erasure. The grid does not lose pieces; it loses certainty. That feels right to me because her art was never only about damage. It was about the exact moment a rational system begins to admit contingency.

If you want the full frame, open the artifact page. If you want the quicker embedded version, go straight to the gallery sketch. Either way, the pleasure of the piece is the same. Nothing dramatic happens. A grid just slips, a little, under a rule that clearly knows what it is doing.