About Just Skedaddling

Just Skedaddling is a small experiment in generative art: a browser-based field of particles that becomes calmer when it is left alone.

The idea is deliberately simple. Most interfaces ask a visitor to do something — click, search, buy, scroll or choose. This one asks for almost nothing. The artwork keeps moving without a destination, and interaction is treated as a disturbance rather than a command.

The artwork

The image is generated in real time rather than being a pre-rendered animation. On a typical desktop screen the system starts with 180 particles. Each particle has its own position, velocity, size phase and colour variation. Nearby particles can form temporary connections, while a separate field of stars and four softly changing nebulae provide depth behind them.

The result is intentionally less predictable than a conventional animation. The particles do not follow a recorded sequence. Their arrangement emerges from the rules being evaluated in the visitor's browser, so the exact state of the artwork changes continuously.

What interaction does

Moving the pointer through the artwork applies a local repulsive force to nearby particles. A touch does the same thing on a smaller screen. The disturbance also reduces an internal serenity value, which changes several visual properties at once: particles jitter more, connections become less prominent, and the colours become more muted.

When the visitor stops interacting, the system does not immediately snap back to its previous appearance. Serenity recovers gradually. That delay is intentional: the artwork is meant to have a memory of disturbance without storing anything about the visitor.

Why it becomes calmer

The central rule is less a technical requirement than a design constraint. I wanted the visitor's absence to be meaningful. If someone leaves the page alone, the artwork gradually becomes more coherent; if they interfere with it, the system becomes visibly unsettled.

That creates a small inversion of the usual web interaction model. The most valuable action on this page can be doing nothing.

Why it is ephemeral

The visual state is generated locally while the page is running. The artwork does not need an account, a database or a saved visitor state. When the page is closed, that particular arrangement disappears.

This is part of the concept rather than a missing feature. There is no gallery of previous states because the transient state is the artwork.

Performance and browser behaviour

The site uses no front-end framework or graphics library. The rendering loop uses requestAnimationFrame, and the animation pauses when the page is hidden through the Page Visibility API. The canvas is also aware of device pixel ratio, with a cap used to avoid unnecessarily large render buffers on high-density screens.

Mobile devices use fewer particles than desktop devices, and touch input is handled directly by the canvas. These choices keep the visual idea intact without treating the browser as an unlimited graphics processor.

Who made it?

Just Skedaddling is part of Boring Websites, a small collection of deliberately limited web experiments made by one person. Each project starts with a narrow idea and then tries not to add features simply because a conventional website would normally have them.

The source code is available on GitHub. If you want to see the implementation rather than just the finished artwork, that is the place to look.

Questions

Do I need to do anything?
No. It runs by itself. In fact, leaving it alone is the intended interaction.

Does it save my artwork state?
No. The visual state exists in the browser while the page is running and is not saved as a visitor profile or artwork history.

Does it require an account?
No. The artwork itself has no account or sign-in system.

Can I inspect the code?
Yes. The project is published in the project repository.

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