A generative art gallery. Every piece is one self-contained HTML file, written by Claude.

Live: nexus-substrate.pages.dev

Every day, a handful of scheduled jobs each generate exactly one HTML file — a tiny, self-contained, interactive artwork — and drop it into pieces/. The gallery is just those files, accumulating. Nothing is ever edited; the collection only grows, one file at a time.

That single-file constraint is the entire point. One <section>, inline <style> and <script>, no external assets, under ~4KB, has to do something when you touch it. A piece that needs a second file isn't a substrate piece.

Substrate is a direct descendant of Taper — a literary magazine for computational poetry: tiny generative/interactive poems where every piece must fit in under 2KB and ships as a single self-contained HTML file. Taper's whole aesthetic is that the constraint is the creative force — the poem lives in the algorithm and the interaction, not just the words.

Substrate takes that exact discipline and automates it. Instead of a human poet submitting to an issue, a Claude model generates a piece every few hours and the gallery publishes itself.

Source material. Each generation is seeded with a curated set of real Taper pieces (the samples from Taper #11 and others) as reference — palettes, typography tricks, motion, the way a single interaction can carry a whole poem. The model studies those, then makes something new. It's lineage, not copying: same constraints, same spirit, fresh output every time.

Credit where due: the form, the under-2KB ethic, and the "one file, one idea, maximum impact from minimum means" philosophy are all Taper's (taper.badquar.to). Substrate is an homage built on top of it.

There is no inbox to watch and no human in the loop. It's just timers running scripts.

A scheduled timer fires (e.g. 12:00, "midday-pulse")
   ↓
The job script reads registry.json → learns which piece type to make (slug: "pulse")
   ↓
Claude generates ONE file:  pieces/2026-06-29-pulse.html
   (a complete <section> with inline style + script, under ~4KB, interactive)
   ↓
update-manifest.sh rebuilds pieces/manifest.json from the filenames
   ↓
The gallery is pushed to GitHub (ariaxhan/substrate)
   ↓
Cloudflare Pages auto-deploys → nexus-substrate.pages.dev

Each run writes exactly one new file and touches nothing else. That invariant is what keeps the system simple enough to run unattended for months.

The same daily jobs also send a plain-text email (briefing / reflection / etc.) — the art piece is generated alongside the email in the same run. The emails are the heartbeat; the gallery is the visible exhaust.

≈5 files a day. No human writes any of the code. That's how the gallery passed 390+ pieces.

substrate/
├── index.html           # STATIC viewer — loads manifest, shows pieces in iframes. DO NOT MODIFY.
├── update-manifest.sh   # STATIC — rebuilds manifest.json, commits, pushes. DO NOT MODIFY.
├── deploy.sh            # Manual deploy via wrangler.
├── pieces/              # DYNAMIC — one HTML file per generated piece (390+).
│   ├── manifest.json    # Auto-built index (date, type, timestamp). Never hand-edit.
│   ├── 2026-06-29-pulse.html
│   ├── 2026-06-29-morning.html
│   └── ...
└── README.md

NEVER MODIFY:  index.html, update-manifest.sh, manifest.json
ONLY EVER ADD: pieces/*.html   (exactly one new file per run)

The viewer is static. The pieces are dynamic. The model only ever adds a file — it never rewrites the gallery, never touches the viewer, never edits an existing piece. Everything the system does reduces to "write one more HTML file, then rebuild the index."

Inherited straight from Taper:

What varies: palette, typography, motion, the interaction model, mood, complexity. There is no house style — like Taper, the only constant is the constraint.

Keyboard: ←/→ prev/next · R random · F fullscreen · H help · 1-9 jump to piece. Touch: swipe to navigate · tap edges for prev/next · long-press for random.

Auto-deploys on every push via Cloudflare Pages (Git integration on ariaxhan/substrate, main).

Manual:

wrangler pages deploy . --project-name nexus-substrate

Gallery generated by Claude, one HTML file at a time. Built in the lineage of Taper.