Hors saison · Un herbier de l'impossible

Highlights

• The flower is a photograph composited in WebGL

  One quad, one fragment shader, and the studio backdrop keyed out by luminance between 0.16 and 0.31. The photograph has no alpha channel: the shader cuts it out, so the site's aubergine shows between the petals and the title slips in behind them. Breathing, rotation around the heart and radial deformation are computed every frame, never prerecorded.

• The cursor knows whether it is on a petal

  The test re-runs the shader's exact transform in JavaScript, zoom, rotation, breathing and deformation included, then reads a 256 px luminance mask built once at load time with a 2D canvas. Without it the windows would open onto empty backdrop, and the flower's own movement would be enough to throw them off.

• Nine X-ray windows, wired to each other

  A second photograph, the flower's X-ray, is visible only inside those rectangles: the shader receives their nine coordinates every frame and reveals nothing outside them, with no fade. Their borders, their botanical captions and the threads joining their corners are DOM and SVG laid on top, pixel for pixel in the same place.

• An exploration that never repeats itself

  Each satellite window visits its own points on the flower, drawn without immediate repetition, with holds of 0.625 to 1.625 second and an instant replacement, threads included, rather than a drift. The exploration clock only advances while the cursor is on the flower: leave the header and everything stops where it stands.

• A header you can tune, kept by the browser

  From 1 to 9 windows, 60 to 260 px a side, thread density, speed from 0.25 to 4 times. Settings apply live, are stored in localStorage and export as JSON.

• 1.1 MB, no dependency, no build step

  One HTML file, one CSS file, one script, seven WebP images for 686 KB and five fonts served from the site for 337 KB. Rendering is capped at 1.5 times the screen's density and 45 frames per second, in a low-power WebGL context. Without WebGL the photograph stays put, and the system's reduced-motion setting brings everything to a stop.