Mireille
This flock is drawn with WebGL, which this browser has turned off. The story still reads below: dust, then a swallow, then a name.
Begin with dust.
Sixty thousand grains of light, scattered without a plan. Each one already knows two more homes.
Scroll
Move through them
First they remember a swallow — spring’s homecoming, low over the Rhône plain.
And then a name. Mirèio in Provençal, Mireille in French — the country girl Frédéric Mistral spent eight years setting into verse.
The poem was published in 1859; Gounod made it an opera in 1864; Mistral shared the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904.
One flock, three homes
No video, no morph software — one WebGL point cloud whose sixty thousand particles each carry three addresses. The scrollbar decides how far each grain has traveled between them.
The sampling
The swallow and the name are painted once on a hidden canvas; the pixels are read back, and each particle is thrown at a random inked spot. A shape becomes sixty thousand coordinates.
The morph
Every particle holds its starfield, swallow and word positions as vertex attributes. A shader mixes between them — the CPU never touches a particle after load, which is how a phone can carry the whole flock.
The scroll
Scroll position is the story’s clock. Each grain departs on its own small delay and eases home, so the flock streams into place instead of snapping.