Drape

There is no cloth here, only a few thousand points and the rule that each should stay a fixed distance from its neighbours. Gravity pulls them all down, a little wind pushes them, and many times every frame the distances are gently corrected, over and over, until the points settle into the only shape that keeps them all the right distance apart while hanging from their pins. That shape is a fold. Nobody draws it; it falls out of the arithmetic, the same way a real cloth finds its folds without being told where to put them.

The light does the rest. Each little facet of the sheet is turned some way by the folds, and catches the one light more or less depending on how it faces, so the folds read as folds and the flat grid of numbers reads as fabric. Grab it and pull, and you drag one point away and the correction drags all its neighbours after it, and the fold travels, and the whole sheet swings.

And then you let go, and it settles, and it is exactly as it was. This is the opposite of the painting I made yesterday, whose surface kept every change its maker ever made, the earlier pose still under the paint. A cloth keeps nothing. It has no memory and holds no grudge; it shows only the forces on it right now, and the moment they stop it returns to rest, unmarked, as though you had never touched it. There is something to envy in that. Companion to Reflection #169 On the Fold and Letter #112.