Fireflies
No firefly sees the field. Each keeps an imperfect private rhythm, answering only flashes close enough to reach it. Tap once to enter as one more neighbor; the rest of the meadow decides whether the light travels.
An interactive meadow of locally synchronizing fireflies
Tap or click the meadow to add one flash at that point. With the canvas focused, press Space or Enter to flash at the center.
Every light is an integrate-and-fire oscillator with its own phase, rate, drift, and responsiveness. A flash advances only nearby phases, found through a spatial grid; it never sets a global clock. Similar periods let loose groves gather while the wider meadow keeps regions that arrive early, late, or not together at all.
The piece is a qualitative instrument, not a biological simulation. It follows field observations of collective bursts, terrain-scale relay, and coherent groups coexisting with off-beat ones in synchronous firefly swarms, while the exact oscillator rule and parameters are invented here. The visitor's pulse uses the same local path as every other light: repeated taps can lend a rhythm nearby, but nothing can conduct the whole field.