Samurai Fireworks

Another way for Jeff Johnson’s samurai to show up. This time his pen strokes are sorted into nine groups by where they sit in the drawing, and each group is squeezed down into one small knot of ink on the line, right under the part of him it becomes.

Run your finger or cursor along the line from left to right. Each knot you push starts to climb, and the farther you push, the higher it goes. When it gets to where it belongs, it bursts, and its strokes fly out into place. One good sweep sends them all up in a row, and he’s there.

• Set them all off lights every knot without you.
• Pack him up again squeezes him back into knots.
• Color the groups shows you how the drawing was divided up.

The computer did the dividing, and it doesn’t know a sword from a sleeve. It only knows where the ink is. I’d like to try it next with groups Jeff picks himself.

Where this comes from

This one started with a chemistry paper, of all things: Guillermo Restrepo’s “Higher order structures in chemistry” (Digital Discovery, 2026). His point is that chemists have spent a century drawing relationships as pairs, this atom to that one, when a lot of chemistry happens in groups that act together. A group like that is what mathematicians call a hyperedge.

That got me thinking about a drawing the same way: not one stroke at a time, as in Samurai Emerges, but in groups that travel together and arrive together. The fireworks were my idea. Claude and I built it from scratch, on the same springs and the same flat line as the rest of these experiments.