The muggu at the bottom of the page

Every page of this site ends with a muggu — the dot-grid floor drawing that Telugu households lay out at dawn, loops woven around a lattice of rice-flour points. The one in the footer is drawn by a small program, and it is different on every visit. Refresh and see.

Two things about this practice refuse to leave me alone. First, a muggu is deliberately impermanent: drawn in the morning, walked over by evening, redrawn the next day. A website that regenerates its own ornament on each load is the closest thing a page has to that rhythm. Second — and this is the part that feels like a secret — these drawings have a real mathematical literature. Researchers in Madras were writing formal grammars for them in the 1970s: array grammars, picture languages, the whole apparatus of theoretical computer science pointed at something grandmothers draw freehand before sunrise.

The generative piece, with notes on how it works, lives in /art/muggu.