Goo — the brief for token 32

A summary of what Harm van den Dorpel asked for while making Goo, the thirty-second and last token of Markov's Dream, during one day of work with an LLM on 13 November 2026. His words are quoted with the spelling tidied. Where an instruction changed during the day, the later one is given. Made public at his request on 14 November 2026.

What the token was to be

• The final token and the conclusion of Markov's Dream.
• "A celebration of the progress in my life, without it being cheesy."
• "If the earliest tokens were a comment on modernism and how the squircle from UX design destabilised it, token 32 should represent a complete disintegration of geometry and modernity."
• Still based on squircles: "the new version should somehow still be based on squircles", "curved like a squircle". It relates to token 30, Markov's Window 2023, and token 31, Diagnostics, but carries no text.
• "I am most interested in the deeper logic present in token 30": its typed recursive tree, its memoryless mutation chain, and the difference between a cell held by reference and a cell copied by value.
• The motion should be calmer than a cut from one state to the next: changes are to be continuous (see Motion below).
• The direction he settled on after the first rounds: "basically the behaviour of token 30, with the colours of a Softenon, but animated."

Rules of making

• "The codebase for token 32 shall be made from scratch, using the newest WebGL features and shaders, and should not rely on PIXI anymore." The earlier tokens draw with the PixiJS library.
• "No use of the regular canvas drawing context2d." WebGL only.
• No third dimension.
• "Really use fluid dynamics and particle systems to make the cells split and blend into each other."
• A different structure on every load: "I want the structure to be completely different each time it loads."
• Something is drawn the moment the page opens.

Colour

• "I love the colour palettes of Softenon." The first rounds used the random, channel-gained colours of the Softenon tokens.
• A version in the palette of Markov's Window, token 30's blue, green, magenta, black and white with their gradients, became the favourite and the token.
• Gradients should be directional.
• Merging cells "exchange their colours by mixing paints."
• All five colours in equal measure. Black may fill any cell inside; it never fills the outer shape, which on the black ground would read as a hole.

The look

What he wanted:

• "I want the work to look like metaballs."
• "Drippy, but still solid organic moving shapes, filled with gradients."
• "No sharp shaded edges but smooth shapes, with a gradient and very very light shading."
• "I do not want the particle system to show spots or drops: there should be surfaces of goo, and the individual points they are composed of should not become apparent."
• "You do not need to maintain the fixed geometric shapes of cubes: the shapes can be more organic, contained by their parent, which can also be a more organic curved shape."
• "Less like a lava lamp: the separations between non-mixed shapes can be more harsh."
• Sharp, never stretched, and clean to the edge of the window.

What he rejected:

• Strong bevels: "not that bevelled!"
• Variations that are the same thing in other colours. Of the first round of five proposals, four "all look like the same proposal to me!", and the fifth, in three dimensions, was "definitely not the aesthetic I am looking for".
• The second round of five looks (flat mosaic tiles, plotter-like contour lines, overprinted riso inks, a fused melt, a two-tone inversion): "I don't like these examples at all, forget the entire deck."
• The third round, cell division animated as goo on token 30's squircles: "this is not at all what I want."
• Overlap effects with reflection and shadow, tried at his request: "glass, membrane and gloss I do not like."
• A "corrupt" version: "the corruption only seems to be a filter, it doesn't actually make it fucked up." It was removed. A glitch would have to happen inside the simulation, not as a filter over the finished image.

Composition

• The outer shape fills the window with a small margin: "there can be some margin", "but not that much empty space", and "the root shape should never go beyond the margins of the viewport!"
• Children never leave their parent's surface: "some inner shapes go beyond their parent surface, this should never happen."
• "I still do not want children to touch the edges of their parent container, aim for there to be a little space around." And: "I want the margin from each child to the parent to be the same as the distance between siblings." Earlier in the day he had asked for parents and children to "touch, blend, it can be messy and organic"; the later instruction narrows this: children sit inside the parent with a small, equal gap.
• The shapes are not predefined: "the shape should automatically appear because of the space available of the outline of the parent, not predefined like a shape", "the shape of a child is an emergent phenomenon". "Children should always try to take up the most space available within the boundaries of the parent, and leave equally much space to their other siblings." "If another child would be added, the children would slowly make space for it."
• "The cuts of the subdivisions way more smooth and organic and rounded, not like a pie chart." "Still not hard cuts, but organically rounded curved shapes, keeping some distance to their siblings and their parent."
• Two drawings by him set the spacing: cells fill their region up to an even thin gap, follow the parent's outline, and divide unevenly. Three more drawings added ways of dividing: strips, a small core with lobes around it, cells meeting at a point.

Token 30's logic

• Token 30's tree and its mutation chain drive everything.
• "I want the by-ref and by-val mechanism from token 30 to be active, so there is a concept of instancing by ref, repetition, and when one changes, it changes the other instances too, so there is some sort of recursion. The depth of the recursion can be deeper too, this can be more complicated than it is now."
• "I want the probability for a cell to split into 2 children to be higher than for a cell to split into 4 children."
• "I want it to be moving and morphing and transforming all the time, not just sometimes."
• "Make the entire animation breathe slightly like some of the other tokens," but subtler than they do.

Motion

• "Animation needs to be smooth and continuous, not jolly and sudden. It has to look natural, organic, slow and real."
• "I want all animations and movements, all easing, to feel natural and based on the properties of the siblings and parents of the shape."
• "Sometimes there is a sudden big change in the composition and colour, I do not like that. I want it to be smooth and dirty. If a lot has to change suddenly, like 4 children being removed, then remove them one after the other with some delay between each removal."
• Division as cell division: changes "drip as liquid and split the cell." New children appear "with some delay between each new child."
• Merging: "When a cell of multiple children becomes reduced to one parent, then the colours should slowly mix and blur." "Slowly make them become one, and let them exchange their colours by mixing paints."
• Disappearing: "When shapes disappear, by scaling to zero dimensions, I want that to happen organically too, not sudden, but with natural physics, viscosity." He repeated this most often: "cells (dis)appear far too fast and sudden, I have asked about this many times now."

The hand

• "When I move fast around shapes, I want them to split into multiple cells. Also, when I drag, I want to be able to move things around, within the available possible space."
• A fast stroke adds cells and never removes them; when an early version did the opposite he called it "the opposite result."
• "The mouse interaction is still very unclear and slow": it had to answer at once.
• On a phone a swipe does what the moving mouse does, and a long press takes hold of a cell.

Title, traits, mint

The title of Goo is taken from Sonic Youth's album Goo (1990). The description reads "By Harm van den Dorpel, 2026". The traits use only the trait types of the other tokens: Colours extended classic; Fill linear gradients & solids; Behaviour growing & dividing; Max. nesting depth 8; Breathing volume (subtle); Outlines none. Of the two final pages, plain and with token 30's blend modes (normal, multiply, lighten, luminosity, carried by the goo like its paint), only the blend-mode page went on-chain. He minted the token on 13 November 2026 as version 2 of the on-chain artwork; a third version, which answers touch, was stored the same day (→ Markov's Dream — on-chain).