Nikolai Bockholt DE

Laser Forge

Built

A workbench for generative vector motifs. A base generator produces polylines in millimetres, which optionally run through an arbitrarily long pipeline of distortion layers. What comes out is an SVG, and that goes straight into a pen plotter or a laser.

Close-up of a finished print: fine white lines on black paper, routed at right angles like a circuit diagram, each line a single pen stroke.
What comes out. White gel pen on black paper.

Two properties that make the difference

Seed-deterministic: same seed, same result. In generative work that is not a detail – without determinism you cannot find your way back to a motif that worked.

Shareable via the URL hash: the entire state sits in the address. Passing a motif on means sending a link, not a file.

What's in it

Around fifteen base generators, from flow fields through harmonographs, spirographs, superformula, Truchet tiles, strange attractors and Voronoi cells to L-systems and differential growth. Plus TSP art, which turns an image into one continuous line via weighted stippling, and space-filling curves – Hilbert, Moore, Gosper, Sierpiński – drawn in a single stroke.

Seven distortions sit behind that, from noise warp to Chaikin smoothing. The authoritative list lives in the registry in code, not in the documentation – otherwise the two drift apart.

The plotter drawing orange hatched Voronoi cells on white paper; a second, blue pen is filling the hatching of a single cell.
Voronoi with two pens – the second layer runs as its own pass.

The path doesn't end in the browser: a bridge on a Raspberry Pi is wired straight to the machine and takes the G-code.

The plotter from above: a rectangular aluminium-profile frame with belts, two stepper motors and the pen carriage over a sheet of paper.
The end of the chain. Belts, two motors, one pen.
A finished print lying in grass: densely stacked white lines on black paper, bulging into a ridge across the middle.
Done. Paper, pen, time.

Status

Runs locally: the interface in the browser, the bridge on a Raspberry Pi wired straight to the machine. Not publicly reachable – it's a workshop tool, not a product. The motifs that come out of it are the starting point for SPECIMEN PRESS.

← Everything I've built