Nothing that leaves ever comes back, and what arrives underneath was decided a moment ago.
How fast the field rises. At 1× a thing takes about half a minute to cross the frame.
Which way the field travels, as a bearing: 0 is up, 90 to the right, 180 falling. The lattice turns with it and objects are fed in from whichever edge is behind. Sound follows the picture, so a thing still pans to where it stands.
How far apart they stand. Wider is emptier and calmer; tighter fills the frame. The reading is roughly how many are in view at once.
The share that will not simply stand there: spinning flat, tumbling end over end, stuttering into a new attitude and staying wrong, or drifting through colors. The rest ride up perfectly still, which is what makes the others read. Breathing is set on its own, below.
Swelling and shrinking where they stand. It is the one thing the field can do together, so it is set apart from the rest: any object can breathe, whatever else it is doing, and all four of these apply to what is already on screen rather than to what is dealt next.
How many of them breathe. Move it and the field takes it up or lets it go where it stands, swelling in from the size it was.
Breaths a minute. Scattered, they take their own pace either side of it; in the other three they all take this one.
How far the swell goes, as a share of the object's own size. Deep enough and a field of things standing still becomes a field that is plainly alive.
Whether they agree. Scattered, every one is on its own clock, which is the field breathing by accident. Together, all of them at once. Alternate, every other column against the ones beside it. Wave, a swell running up the field the way the field runs. Changing this does not jerk anything: whatever is on screen slides into formation over a few seconds.
Listens through the microphone, finds the beat of whatever is playing near you, and breathes to it: the rate snaps to the nearest whole number of beats, and the stutterers land on the beat too. The piece goes quiet while it listens, or it would be following itself. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere.
Every object plays its own voice, panned to where it stands and loudest through the middle of the frame. It fades as the thing leaves and is silent once the last of it is gone. Level is the slider in the header, and it starts at nothing.
The set
70 items: from a ladderback to a bathtub to a cheeseburger.
Models by Kenney and Quaternius are Creative Commons CC0. 5 of the chairs, the clothes iron, the dumbbell and the desk lamp are original models.