Spring arrives on the plains the way it arrives on a gabbeh, knot by knot. Each work in this collection of 250 is a living scene woven into a rug while you watch. A tree leans into the wind and wild grass bends. Red poppies with black hearts open in the meadow, and tall green petals sway above them. Between one and ten horses graze, play, neigh and gallop across the field.

Every frame is read through the loom, so nothing is ever quite a picture: it is wool, pile and dye. Each edition is woven in one of five Iranian textiles: gabbeh, farsh, gelim, jajim or zilu. Its colours come from fourteen gabbeh templates of natural dyes such as madder, indigo, weld and walnut. The rug sits inside a woven passe-partout carrying the motifs of its own tradition.

The horses come from Persian painting, from Timurid Herat and Shiraz to the Safavids, and they wear the coat colours of the old farasnameh. Very rarely, one of them is the blue horse of the mystics. Click the rug and the herd startles: they rear, neigh and bolt across the plain. An eight-minute generative score moves from calm through anger and longing to love, played alongside the wind. No two springs are woven alike.

Keys

• Click: startle the horses, and start the wind and music
• W: wind on / off
• ↑ / ↓: wind volume
• M: music play / pause
• → / ←: music volume
• N: horses’ voices on / off
• S: save a high-quality image (3456 px)
• R: record a 30-second GIF
• V: record a 30-second video with sound
• H: show the keys

Technical notes

Written in p5.js and the Web Audio API, with no outside dependencies. The Verse hash seeds separate random streams for the weave, palette, horses, poppies, petals, sun and music, so the same hash always gives the same work. Each frame the scene is painted live, then read cell by cell into a grid of 96 to 144 knots or weaves and dyed from a fixed set of wools. Each textile has its own surface: pile for gabbeh and farsh, ribs for gelim, beads for jajim and cotton for zilu