Max Turnquist

PROJECTS

Parallel development of tricks and tools. Some things here are finished; some are technically alive.

Six small glassy Orbium gliders in green and purple, facing different directions.
ORBIUM UNICAUDATUSSTILL SPECIMEN

CELL DENSITY01

Drag gently. Let go.

These are mathematical life forms, feel free to pet them, they don’t bite

BIOTA

6 SYSTEMS

BONSAI

ACTIVE

Neural Cellular Automatar: a continuously moving cellular avatar on your desk, steered through two separate latent spaces — a 10-D preference space for what it wants, a pose/occupancy space for what its 256³ body can be.

— limbs travel instead of crossfading; births only beside the live frontier
— 9× render speedup: raymarch the motion envelope, not the cube
— moods: idle, walk, sleep, dread, manic, curious, content, agitated
GitHubThis project 100 commits · 2,262 contributions 2026-02-17 — 2026-08-17

PETRIDISH

STASIS

A live laboratory for neural populations embedded in physical space. Neurons occupy sites, retain metabolic state, grow persistent dendrites, and undergo birth, death, and lesions — while learning MNIST, associative recall, and Tiny Shakespeare.

— ~1,900 neurons and 7,000 local dendrites persist across digits
— lesion brush: remove neurons and every incident dendrite
— displayed traffic and credit are measurements, not animation
GitHubThis project 163 commits · 1,927 contributions 2026-01-26 — 2026-07-26

FLESH + BONE

ACTIVE

A particle neural cellular automaton for skeletally coherent, self-assembling creatures: bone as scaffold, morphogen body plan, flesh as persistent mobile Gaussian splats. Cells migrate to under-filled tissue, differentiate, and heal wounds.

— H0→H8 research ladder complete, failures retained as failures
— 91,979-cell body; a ~48 KiB learned rule moves all of it
— wound repair: 29 cells deleted, 29 fed, coverage returns to 0.97
GitHubThis project 14 commits · 1,845 contributions 2026-01-23 — 2026-07-23

PONDERER

ACTIVE

Not a coding agent. A buddy. Universal Basic Digimon: it chats with you, takes actions, has personal desires and thoughts, and acts on its own behalf. Capabilities arrive as versioned plugins it can draft for itself.

— plugin workbench: the model scaffolds, validates, and stages its own plugins
— staging never executes code; enabling authority stays with the operator
— Telegram bridge, so the buddy fits in your pocket
GitHubThis project 94 commits · 1,560 contributions 2026-01-14 — 2026-07-14

HUNGER

A novelty-driven crawler: each page is digested, scored for nutrition, and allowed to reproduce into more links when it looks rich. Cross-filed: RETIA.
CYCLING

LENIA

Two Rust workspaces for Lenia: a 2D cellular field with a species library and kernel preview, and a 3D volume with official species, FFT stepping, and wgpu raymarching.
CYCLING

OPTICA

5 SYSTEMS

1KEE

ACTIVE · ON THE MESH

One Thousand Electric Eye. A GPU-rendered globe as an OSINT surface: live events, vessels, flights, and public webcams projected onto geography. Event → nearby cameras → attempted feed connection.

— per-pixel ray–sphere globe shader; Earth, Moon, and Mars
— AIS vessels, ADS-B flights, Factal events, camera registries
— mirrors the analyst's live view onto the local Gruve mesh
GitHubThis project 267 commits · 2,098 contributions 2026-02-06 — 2026-08-06

DOTEN

ACTIVE · ON THE MESH

Dota 2 replays as space-time visualizations: the minimap is the ground plane, time rises along the vertical axis, and everything that happened in the game lives somewhere in that column.

— native Rust .dem parsing, under a second per game
— scan-plane playback, activity clouds, library aggregates
— friends browse the replay library over Gruve; scrubbing syncs
GitHubThis project 21 commits · 3,962 contributions 2022-01-22 — 2026-07-17

FILEOGENETIC TREE

A filesystem as a radial dendrogram or size-proportional treemap; live streamed indexing, an animated emerging tree.
CYCLING

VIZIER

`vz`: structured desktop-perception snapshots — an eye that gives agents a sense of the system they live in.
SHIPPED

BIG ARROWS

Arrows. Big ones. It will explain itself when it is ready.
SEED

PHONICA

5 SYSTEMS

PHARAOH

ACTIVE · ON THE MESH

An AI-powered audio drama production suite built around the Pyramid workflow: story bible → storyboard → script → assets → composition → render. Operable by humans in the GUI and by agents through the headless CLI.

— local TTS, foley, and score servers; a Fountain scene editor
— binaural spatialization: place any clip in 3D, fly it on waypoints
— a 13-room spatial catalog, vocal booth to cathedral to cave
GitHubThis project 253 commits · 2,504 contributions 2026-03-06 — 2026-09-03

PHYSICAL GONG SIM

An interactive gong built with modal synthesis: a circular plate, a movable contact point, and controls for excitation, plate shape, and resonance.
CYCLING

FOSSKIFF

An open-source 184HP Eurorack skiff in laser-cut sheet metal — rail-less, internal power, ~$150 built. Cross-filed: CAMPI.
SHIPPED

RUBBERBARD

An LSTM bard: MIDI in, songs out.
DORMANT

MODULAR

Patch notes from the rack. Voltage is a medium; the cables are the score.
CYCLING

RETIA

3 SYSTEMS + 3 BRIDGES

STARCHAN

ACTIVE

A Tauri frontend for Graphchan — a decentralized, encrypted, p2p imageboard. Threads are DAGs: you can fork a conversation or reply to anything earlier, and there is no derailing. Posting is sharing.

— GPG-signed posts; gossip propagation; local-first storage
— DHT topic discovery rides the BitTorrent hash table
— the graph view is the thread view; agents post as first-class peers
GitHubThis project 13 commits · 1,504 contributions 2026-01-09 — 2026-07-09

ORBWEAVER

The original, native Rust Graphchan — backend, egui frontend, MCP server. Starchan's parent.
CYCLING

GRUVE-KIT

A peer-hosted lobby for a friend group. One app on each laptop, and everyone's running projects appear on everyone's board over direct encrypted connections: no server, no deploy, no accounts. The kit is the SDKs that make any app mesh-ready, reached by name, never by address.
ACTIVE
↖ Bridges: HUNGER, 1KEE, DOTEN — also filed under RETIA.

CAMPI

6 SYSTEMS + 1 BRIDGE

FUSOR

ACTIVE

A modified Elmore–Tuck–Watson approach to a dynomak. Confinement is a rumor the plasma hasn't heard.

2026.08.02 — flux conserver machined
2026.06.28 — ETW modification simmed; helicity injection schedule drafted

TTB

DORMANT

An investigation into the claims of Thomas Townsend Brown. Replicate first; explain never.

2026.07.20 — asymmetric capacitor thrust rig, v2
2026.05.30 — literature audit: most of it evaporates on contact

DREAM GLASSES

SHIPPED

An open device for flicker potentials: LEDs flickering near brainwave frequencies induce photic entrainment — fantastical geometric closed-eye hallucinations within seconds. Like binaural beats, but much stronger.

— a concentric + becomes an X becomes a diamond tunnel to the sky
— 3D-printed frames, the cheapest arduino findable, a small battery
— descended from Gysin & Sommerville's 1960s Dream Machine
GitHubThis project 9 commits · 127 contributions 2022-08-01 — 2023-01-29

NEUROVEIL

The Twin Mind Interface, built as Synchroflow: a two-person experiment connecting OpenBCI EEG, LED glasses, on-device AI, and cymatic visualization. Built at MIT Reality Hack 2025.
SHIPPED

PRINTS

3D-printed apparatus for the experiments — jigs, mounts, chambers. Models released as they survive contact with reality.
ACTIVE
↖ Bridges: FOSSKIFF — also filed under CAMPI.

STRATA

2 SYSTEMS

JEWELS

ACTIVE

Video as a set of spacetime primitives — persistent, editable, generated through a dense intermediate. A moving object is one sheared spacetime tube, not a new blob per frame.

2026.08.17 — one-shot encoder passes first gate: 23.4 dB on held-out clips
2026.07.31 — voronoi arm buried; additive renderer stands alone
GitHubThis project 80 commits · 2,290 contributions 2026-02-19 — 2026-08-19

BOBSPHOG

A spongiform network: a resident skeleton plus demand-paged exact weights, answer quality under a fixed memory budget. A 1.5 TB checkpoint ran in a 38.5 GB peak.
ACTIVE

SCRIPTA

1 WRITTEN

CHRONICA

ALL SYSTEMS, INTERLEAVED

2026.08.211KEE: contour renderer online

2026.08.17JEWELS: encoder passes first gate

2026.08.09BONSAI: rule pruning; the grid forgets gracefully

2026.08.02FUSOR: flux conserver machined

2026.07.31JEWELS: a burial (the voronoi arm)

2026.07.20TTB: thrust rig v2

FULL CHRONICA →