The muggu generator
What it is. Every page of this site ends with a muggu — the woven-loop floor drawing of Telugu courtyards — generated procedurally and drawn fresh on each visit. The full-size piece, with a redraw button, lives at /art/muggu.
Why. The footer needed a signature, and I didn’t want a logo. A muggu is the right kind of mark for a home: it is drawn at the threshold, it is redrawn every morning, and nobody signs it. Making the computer lay a new one for each visitor felt truer to the practice than framing a single perfect one.
What surprised me. The mathematics arrived uninvited. To guarantee that every strand closes into a loop, the generator picks a random pattern from the cycle space of the dot grid — XOR-ing together the boundaries of randomly chosen cells, which forces every dot to have an even number of strands. Once that holds, each dot only ever sees 0, 2, or 4 strand-ends, every case draws as a quarter-circle arc centred on a cell corner, and neighbouring arcs meet on the same circle — so the loops come out smooth without any curve-fitting at all. The elegance was already sitting inside the muggu; the program just had to get out of its way.
The deeper rabbit hole — that these drawings have a formal-language literature going back to the 1970s — is written up alongside the piece itself.