What is money?

Highlights

• A pinned page, fifty-five screens of travel

  One sticky screen and twelve paintings that follow one another on it: nothing enters or leaves the page's flow, everything is placed frame by frame by a shared camera, from the scroll position alone. On a desktop screen that is 44,700 px of travel for a page that never moves.

• The damped scroll is hand-written, and the page can read itself

  No library: a target, a current position, an exponential catch-up independent of the screen's refresh rate, and the page's real position kept in step behind it. Wheel, keyboard, scrollbar and finger all come in through the same door. Auto-play gives the nine stations 3 min 10, and the smallest gesture hands control back to the visitor.

• Every painting is a stack of planes, never one image

  Five to nine planes per station, measured once and for all in a positions file, each with its own depth coefficient: that is what decides how much a plane answers the camera and the cursor. Cursor parallax is proportional to the window's width and held to 35 % vertically, so nothing peels away.

• The crackled varnish is baked into all 1,155 files

  The craquelure network is computed in plate coordinates, not screen ones: at rest every plane's cracks join into one single cracked canvas, and when parallax separates the planes each one carries its own. Cell borders at two scales bent by noise, a dark hairline with a lighter lip, canvas weave and amber mottling. The bare layers are kept aside, and the varnished ones rebuild in one command.

• Six shaders written for this site

  The dot screen on the clouds, the engraving of the coin, two fires, the smoke-out and the live craquelure are WebGL fragment shaders, drawn into a canvas in their plane's place, never image filters. Rendering is capped at 1.5 times the screen's density.

• Three films scrubbed frame by frame

  541 frames (240, 180 and 121), in two widths depending on the screen, requested six at a time starting from both ends then in dyadic steps: the shot is playable before it has fully arrived, in either direction. Each film's camera is measured frame by frame, so the captions and their threads ride the landscape instead of vanishing with it.