Blot: make an inkblot, and the page tells you what it sees
The story behind Blot
Premise An inkblot test turned around: you make the blot, and the page reads it back to you, deadpan and certain. A machine seeing things in noise, played as a clinician’s typed report. Audience: web-literate visitors arriving from X or the archive. Perf target: a few milliseconds a frame, with the machine staying quiet
Reference Hermann Rorschach’s plates (dense black ink, crisp lobed edges, the red of plates II and III), sumi ink on washi, and the typed reports that went with the test
Built with WebGL2 (no libraries) for the ink and the fold, DOM for the page
Techniques A wet-on-wet ink simulation with absorbance colour, fixation, edge darkening and fibre-guided fingering; a fold transfer that mirrors wet ink across the crease with a spine of pooled ink; a paper flap rendered as one bent sheet with curl shading and a lift shadow; readings chosen from a hand-written bank by measuring the blot; a 30 fps idle and a pause when hidden
Direction A white cold-press card on a dark slate desk, black ink with one carmine. Instrument Serif and Courier Prime
The Story
The inkblot test asks you what you see. This one tells you instead. You drip ink on a card, fold it, press it and open it, and a perfectly mirrored blot appears, as it does for anyone who has ever folded wet paint in half. Then a line types out next to it: Plate I. A moth, carrying its own reflection home. Confidence: complete.
It is a small joke about machines that see faces in noise and say so with total certainty. It is also, mostly, just a lovely thing to do with ink.
The Take
- Watch it once. On load, drops fall onto the card, the card folds itself, presses, and opens, and the first reading appears.
- Make your own. Tap to drip, hold to pool, drag to smear (fast strokes break up like a dry brush), flick to splatter. The red well under the card switches to red ink.
- Fold it. Drag the card’s left edge across, or tap Fold. The sheet curls over, presses (you can see the ink soak through the back), and peels open with the mirrored ink appearing from the crease outward.
- Read it. The reading is picked to fit what the blot actually looks like: wide or tall, islands or one mass, holes, ragged or soft edges, red or none. “Two herons arguing over a fish they have both already eaten.”
- Argue with it. Add more ink to a read card and the reading goes pale: “Confidence: pending.” Fold again for a second opinion.
- Keep them. Another card files the plate. Your plates collect beside the title.
The Tech
Ink on a wet card. The simulation runs on the card’s own grid in half-float textures:
- Spreading: water spreads through a paper whose absorbency varies with its fibres, faster along the grain.
- Fixing: pigment travels with the water but binds to the paper over time, so a drop’s core stays black while its halo thins.
- Edges: at the drying front pigment piles up into a dark rim, and fine tendrils run out along the fibres and stop hard.
- Colour: the ink is rendered as absorbance rather than paint, so black is properly black and carmine over black goes brown-black with a purple halo, as it does on the original plates.
The fold. When the card closes, the wet ink on each half is copied, mirrored, onto the other half through an uneven contact pattern, smeared slightly away from the crease and pooled along it. That’s where the heavy spine of every inkblot comes from. The flap itself is drawn as one sheet bent in a curl that tightens as it closes, lit so the curl shades smoothly, with a shadow on the desk that softens as it lifts.
The reading. After the card opens, a small copy of the blot is read back and measured: spread, height, islands, holes, how ragged the edges are, how much red. Those measurements pick a line from about a hundred and ten, all written by hand in one deadpan voice, never repeating in a session.
Quiet by default. The card only redraws while ink is wet or the sheet is moving. A dry card on the desk costs nothing, and the page stops when the tab is hidden.
The readings are made up on the spot, which is rather the point.
This blog post was AI generated with Claude Code. Authored by Artificial Noodles.