CRITERIA — a generative media-art instrument by SISTER RAY

CRITERIA is a browser-based generative artwork by SISTER RAY, the creative label of Motoki Takeuchi. It converts a single piece of footage — the take-off and climb of ANA flight NH125 from Los Angeles on 7 February 2024 — into a live field of dot-matrix glyphs rendered in real time with WebGL2 and hand-written GLSL shaders. Each cell of the image is quantised into a character by its brightness, so the moving picture is continuously re-read as data rather than shown directly.

Over this field, five autonomous scouting instruments drift across the frame and report flight telemetry: elapsed time, estimated altitude, apparent speed, dynamic pressure and bank angle. Every value is labelled by its origin — MEAS for quantities measured from the image, DERIV for quantities computed from those measurements, and MODEL for quantities fitted only to elapsed time. Bank angle is read from the horizon line; where the aircraft enters cloud and the horizon cannot be read, that value is withheld. The work treats disclosure of method as part of the piece: it states what it measures and what it merely assumes.

CRITERIA belongs to SEISMOSCOPE, an ongoing series of observation instruments by SISTER RAY that read spatial and temporal records — seismic data, terrain, flight — through distinct visual methods. Its companion instrument, ALETHEIA, visualises post-2011 seismic sources as a three-dimensional field. Where ALETHEIA concerns un-concealment, CRITERIA concerns the criterion: the human-made measure through which a passage is observed.

Technical implementation: the work runs entirely in the browser with WebGL2 and hand-written GLSL fragment shaders (GLSL ES 3.0), in a two-pass pipeline — a first pass samples each video frame into a grid of luminance-quantised cells, and a second pass renders each cell as a dot-matrix glyph from a signed atlas, with brightness-driven glyph selection and additive glow. Real-time video analysis in JavaScript derives the flight telemetry: horizon-line detection for bank angle, brightness tracking for apparent speed, and elapsed-time models for altitude and dynamic pressure. No engine or framework is used — the rendering is raw WebGL. The scout sampling uses plastic-number constants for low-discrepancy motion across the frame.

Themes and techniques: generative art, data visualisation, media art, spatial records, creative coding, WebGL2, GLSL, fragment shaders, real-time video processing, interactive artwork, dot-matrix typography, browser-based generative art.

SISTER RAY produces commissioned generative and data-driven media artwork, 3D Gaussian Splatting, drone capture and AI / digital consulting. For enquiries, see sister-ray.jp.