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Showcase 19 · Block universe

Nothing Is Over

Mira, her mother Hanne and Jonas, whom she meets at 24: here their lives are not a sequence of pictures but strands of a single sculpture. Slide the cutting plane through the form to look at one moment, and zoom out to see the whole life at once. None of it is over; it just lies somewhere else.

The live demo needs JavaScript. The story and the explanation below are readable without it.

The story in six scenes

  1. In the garden

    Mira is six. She runs circles around the house, Hanne stands at the fence and calls her in to eat. Their lines lie so close they almost touch.

  2. The bicycle

    Mira is eleven. Hanne holds the carrier and lets go without saying so. From here Mira's line moves far from the house for the first time.

  3. On the platform

    Mira is 24. A late train, a shared bench, Jonas. Two lines coming from different directions meet in one point.

  4. Together

    Mira is 33. One flat, two names on the doorbell. Mira's and Jonas' lines wind around each other like a braid.

  5. The house

    Mira is 52. She sits with Hanne, in the same house as in the garden back then. Soon after, Hanne's line ends. In this picture her childhood does not lie behind her, only somewhere else in the form.

  6. The armchair

    Mira is 59. She sits in Hanne's old armchair. In the cut Hanne is missing – in the whole form her line is fully there.

How it works

The idea behind it is called the block universe, or eternalism: past, present and future are equally real, and everything that happens forms one four-dimensional block. Here it becomes a three-dimensional form. One axis is time, the other two stand for places and closeness in the story. Every person is a strand that begins and ends where their life in the story begins and ends. The cutting plane shows who is there at one moment; it only moves when you move it. There is no playback.

Important: the plane you move and the view from outside are a figure of speech for the illustration. They are neither physical proof of the block universe nor a claim that a consciousness could wander about outside of time. Relativity has no universal “now”, but it says nothing about whether we live our lives again. Whether time really is like this remains an open philosophical question. Mira, Hanne and Jonas are invented.

It is drawn with Canvas 2D, without WebGL. The lifelines are smoothed from key points with Catmull–Rom curves and laid as a braid of three threads; rings every two years show the hull of the form in the colours of the chapters. Every frame, all line pieces are projected in perspective and sorted by distance. The plane splits them: what lies behind it is drawn first, then the plane with its intersections, then everything in front. All colours come from the design tokens.