Benzaiten is a video synthesiser driven by a fluid simulation. A 2D incompressible fluid runs on a 256×256 grid in WebGL every frame — semi-Lagrangian advection, a curl-noise stirring force, and a pressure projection — and its velocity field is what warps the image. Nothing is pre-rendered. The picture is the state of the simulation, read out as colour.
Five regimes change what is being solved. Domain warp uses layered noise and runs no simulation at all. Navier-Stokes and viscoelastic run the fluid with different responses to shear. The two magnetohydrodynamic regimes evolve a magnetic vector potential under induction — carried by the flow, spread by resistivity — and feed the Lorentz force back into the fluid, so current sheets build and tear. A magnetic injection control sets how hard the field is re-fed; at zero it is a closed system and decays, which is what a two-dimensional magnetic field has to do.
Three substrates take the flow: a procedural eight-stop colour field, uploaded media (images, looping video, live webcam), and a gradient map that colours media contours by the velocity field. Dragging stirs momentum into the fluid, two fingers open a sink or a source, and audio can drive vorticity, convection rate, and hue on separate frequency bands.
The physics is here to make images, not to model the sun: a cross-sectional plane, incompressible, with the idealisations named in the project's notes rather than smoothed over. Benzaiten began as Hadean Flare, which replaced the static sun with a mutating one, and generalised from that sun to flow.
Includes Ganymede, a WebGL image-warping tool that subjects graphics to animated noise fields, lens distortion, chromatic aberration, and audio reactivity.