About this projectACG

Lost&Found

An essay by Adhit Chandy George, set as a poem in four movements, drawn in a single field of light that changes shape.

How it began

I was captioning some photographs I had taken of trees in winter, and one thought stayed with me: how many patterns there are around us, and how alike everything is, even when so much seems different.

It also made me ask when I started to think of nature as something separate from me, when I am part of it too.

I wanted to make the text I wrote in that moment into a project: a visual storyboard for it. I used Claude to code the page you are looking at now.

Where the shapes came from

These are the photographs I was captioning that evening. Each one gave the poem a scene.

A bare tree in silhouette against an orange sunset, with power lines, a pylon and a fence behind it. — The tree and the wires
A bare tree in front of pylons and a fence. The branches are nature’s handwriting; the wires and the fence are lines we drew straight through it. That picture became the line that runs through the poem, and the towers we build behind it.

A dark storm cloud sitting low over a long row of bare trees, with a band of pale light between them and a pink sunset behind the trunks. — The bright gap
Two slides of the post were really one picture: a storm cloud sitting low over a long row of trees, with a strip of clear light between them. Behind every cloud she leaves a silver lining. It became the cloud frame, and the horizon the particles keep coming back to.

One tall, thin pine standing above a dark forest at dusk, against grey and violet clouds. — One above the forest
One tall pine standing over the rest. On its own a tree is almost nothing, yet it carries the shape of the whole forest. That became the forest frame.

Two close crops of bare branches, one against a pink sky and one against a gold sky. — Branches in two halves
The same branching in two crops, one pink and one gold. Every twig repeats the shape of the tree, which became the fern and the branches that are small trees. The two halves side by side gave me the world split in two.

A thin crescent moon high in a blue evening sky, with clouds fading to peach above the treetops. — The moon at dusk
A thin moon above the clouds, the sky running from blue into peach. The skies of the poem come from evenings like this, moving from day through dusk and night to dawn.

The mathematics in her poems

The patterns in the poem are not decoration. Each is drawn by the same law that shapes it in nature. These notes explain them in the order they appear.

Thank you

Thank you for reading this far. I hope you enjoyed it, and that the next tree you walk past feels a little less separate from you.

Adhit

Set in Spectral, Cinzel and Mrs Saint Delafield. The particles are drawn with three.js. More of my work is at adhitchandy.com.