The Meridian Survey · Chart 001
An atlas of
the uncounted.
A speculative institute that draws maps of movements that never happened: the winds of an invented hemisphere, the currents of a sea with no name, and the routes of creatures that were never counted.
BeginPlate 001 · The premise
A map can be an instrument of imagination, not only a record of what is.
Every atlas is an argument about what deserves to be seen. Meridian makes that argument openly: it charts a hemisphere that was never surveyed, a sea that was never named, and populations that were never counted. Nothing here was photographed. Nothing was traced from the world.
The lines are generated, not drawn by hand and not sampled from data. A flow field is grown from noise, streamlines are integrated through it, and the whole plate resolves under your scroll. The result is a document of a place that does not exist, rendered with the discipline of one that does.
- Projection
- Speculative equirectangular
- Method
- Seeded value-noise field
- Raster
- None. SVG and type only
- Runtime
- Zero JavaScript
Plate 002 · The instrument
Three charts, one moving field.
Scroll, and the survey draws itself. The prevailing winds resolve first, then fold into the currents of the Unnamed Sea, then thin into the routes of the uncounted. One field, read three ways.
Prevailing winds of the Meridian hemisphere
A value-noise flow field, integrated into streamlines. The longest vectors read as jet lines.
Gyres and drift of the Unnamed Sea
The same field, folded around four rotational gyres. Warm filaments trace the fastest drift.
Routes of the uncounted
Sparse routes bowed between survey stations: the paths of creatures that were never counted.
Plate 003 · The method
How the atlas is surveyed.
Four instruments, no runtime. Everything you see was decided at build time and drawn by the browser with style rules alone.
- 01
The field
A seeded value-noise function, sampled in two octaves, assigns a direction to every point on the plate. It is deterministic: the same seed always grows the same weather.
- 02
The pen
From a jittered grid of seeds, streamlines are integrated through the field with a second-order step, forward and back, then smoothed into cubic curves. Currents fold the field around gyres; migrations bow sparse routes between stations.
- 03
The draw
Each line ships with a normalised path length and a hidden dash. A CSS scroll timeline retracts the dash as you read, so the plate draws itself, then reconfigures from winds to currents to routes.
- 04
The legend
A variable typeface carries the reading. Its weight and optical size resolve along the same scroll timeline, so the numbers thicken into focus as the chart they describe comes true.
Plate 004 · The reading room
Read how the survey was drawn.
Meridian is a design study: a full atlas built from SVG and CSS, with no raster and no runtime script. The reading room holds the working notes: the generation method, the fallback strategy, and an honest account of what was and was not made with a machine.
The Meridian Survey · A speculative atlas · No cookies, no tracking, no photographs.