Ether Library · one scene from a classic, animated
Morning on the entangled bank
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth…
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), the last page (Ether Library edition)
On the Origin of Species ends by looking at one riverbank. Darwin asks us to see its plants, birds, insects and worms as forms that depend on one another, all produced by laws acting around us.
This is that bank waking up, in 46 seconds: dew on a web, ferns uncurling, flowers opening, and the branching tree, the only illustration in Darwin's book, growing into the sky.
No video software was used. The browser paints every frame: sky and river on the graphics chip, plants and insects in cel color and ink at 12 drawings a second. The river and the birdsong are code too. Claude (Anthropic) made the pictures and sound; the editorial calls were made by a person.