The Neon Hieroglyph — Point Cloud Environment

The Neon Hieroglyph is Tai Shani’s first online artwork, commissioned by Manchester International Festival: nine stories drawing on her research into ergot, the rye fungus LSD derives from, with a score by Maxwell Sterling. It was presented on Virtual Factory, MIF’s online platform, designed and built by Knoth & Renner.

I came in freelance for the creative-coding side: a three-dimensional environment the viewer moves through before arriving at the video canvas.

The central structure is drawn as points rather than surfaces. Its vertices are read out of the model and rendered as a cloud, so the form is described by where its geometry happens to be dense rather than by any continuous surface. What survives is a silhouette — a structure implied instead of built, which suited a work about hallucination better than a solid object would have.

The surrounding field is generated rather than modelled. A three-dimensional Perlin noise function is sampled across a grid, and a point is placed wherever the value crosses a threshold. Random placement distributes too evenly to read as anything; noise clusters, and the octave count controls how tightly those clusters hold together. The noise implementation is a hand-written port of the classic Perlin algorithm, seeded so the field is identical on every load.

Sampling happens once, on load, into a single buffer. Nothing is recalculated per frame — the field turns as a whole, which is enough movement for something meant to sit behind the work rather than compete with it.

Bloom is applied to the point clouds alone. Run across the whole scene it bled into the video canvas, which had to stay flat and legible with everything around it glowing. The composite renders a bloom pass with every non-glowing object swapped to flat black, then blends that result back over the base render.

Platform: virtual-factory.co.uk

Design and build: Knoth & Renner