The Snick System's third voice is the Circuit: Mondrian's Boogie-Woogie, small squares travelling the lines like traffic seen from a high window. This study asks the hard question first — not can the grid carry signals, but how few, how irregular, and how attentive they must be before motion stops reading as a screensaver and starts reading as a place where something is quietly happening.
Three stages, one composition. Nine blocks on the base grid, two of them carrying words; one white pop on plane +1 and one glass overlay on the 5-grid. Nothing in the composition changes between studies — only the conductor does. Each conductor is the same small script in a different mode, and each stage reports what its conductor is thinking in the mono line above it.
A pulse is a block too: a square three-sixteenths of a row on a side, the signal color leading, ink and navy following when it travels as a train. It keeps to the stage's own grid lines — read back from the resolved layout, not assumed — moves at one row per beat regardless of distance, turns only at corners, and threads under anything that carries words. Watch it disappear beneath the white block's sentence and reappear on the far side. That's the sliver law extended to things that move: structure never crosses out the type. reduced motion: pulses blink at corners instead of travelling
Avenues: 7 base, 5 overlay. Streets: one per row. Pulses keep to the lines.
A signal is a block that moves. It keeps to the lines, turns only at corners, and goes under the type.
AXI-002
Avenues: 7 base, 5 overlay. Streets: one per row. Pulses keep to the lines.
A signal is a block that moves. It keeps to the lines, turns only at corners, and goes under the type.
AXI-002
Avenues: 7 base, 5 overlay. Streets: one per row. Pulses keep to the lines.
A signal is a block that moves. It keeps to the lines, turns only at corners, and goes under the type.
AXI-002
Every constant below is a proposal, published so it can be argued with. They were tuned by watching, not derived — and the tuning converged on less every time.
| Rule | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| tempo | 1 row / 220 ms | Constant speed, whatever the distance. A long avenue takes longer; the signal doesn't hurry to fit. Speed is a system constant, not a per-animation choice. |
| size | 3/16 row | 12 px at XL, 9 px at S — the thin-sliver scale. Big enough to be a block, small enough to be a passer-by. |
| quiet gap | ~5.2 s mean · 1.4–14 s | Exponential, so silences are genuinely unpredictable and sometimes long. Long enough that a pulse arriving is an event. |
| active gap | ~0.95 s mean · 0.32–3.2 s | Once something is happening, a little more happens — clusters read as traffic, evenness reads as machinery. |
| burst length | ≤ 5 · p(end)=.3 each | Bursts end early more often than they run long. The distribution's tail is what makes it feel alive. |
| cap | 2 in flight (1 at S) | Two moving things can be watched. Three is a scene; the eye gives up and generalizes. |
| refractory | 4 s per lane | A lane that just carried goes quiet; the next signal appears somewhere else. The composition gets toured, not drilled. |
| turn | p=.3 at each corner · ≤ 4 turns | Most pulses cross straight. The occasional turn onto a street is the Boogie-Woogie moment, and it should stay occasional. |
| train | 1 in 5 during bursts · 3 cars | Signal, ink, navy, two squares apart. The painting's own rhythm, rationed. |
| observation | ≥ 30% in view · tab visible | No motion off-screen, and no catching up on return. What you didn't see didn't happen. |
| depth | z1 | Over empty fields, under words, under overlays. Pulses are structure in motion and structure never crosses out the type. |
minmax since v0.1.3, so a text block can grow its row; a conductor that assumed 64-px rows would drift off the lines the moment prose ran long. The conductor asks the browser for the resolved tracks instead and is correct by construction at every edition.