About · The Lattice · v0.3
Every handshake, past · present · future.
The Lattice is a free, browser-based interactive visualization of human contact. It holds more than 1,600 handshakes — greetings, alliances, intimacies, exchanges — spanning 2000 BCE to 2200 CE, rendered through seven lenses and set to 86 original tracks tuned to 432 Hz. It was made by one person, wxza, as a single HTML file.
01What a handshake is here
The unit of The Lattice is the handshake: two parties, a year, a domain, a weight. A merchant and a stranger on the Silk Road. A diplomat and a counterpart at a signing table. Two computers completing a TCP exchange. Each is a pulse of contact — some anchored to the historical record, most woven procedurally as the background hum of four millennia, and a few that never happened at all.
Every handshake belongs to one of eight domains: greeting, alliance, intimacy, exchange, creation, machine, farewell, and crossing. The domains are meridians — each owns a band of longitude on the sphere.
02Time as geography
On the home lens, latitude is time. The deep south of the sphere is 2000 BCE; the equator is now, the year 2026; the far north is 2200 CE. The past carries more density and gravity than the future, which appears only as a cool probabilistic shimmer. You are not observing the lattice from outside — your present sits on the equator, inside it.
03The seven lenses
One dataset, seven instruments. Sphere is the globe. Chord draws ribbons between domains. River lays the centuries out as a stream. Rhyme sets structurally similar handshakes from different eras side by side. Song turns the lattice into an audio-reactive body. Undefined flickers with phantom handshakes that never happened. Index is the flat, searchable list of everything. And an eighth chamber, Brass, reads nothing at all — it bends the melody itself through a live marching-band chain. Each is described in detail on the lenses page.
04The sound
The Lattice carries a library of 86 original tracks, played through the Web Audio API and tuned down from concert pitch to 432 Hz. The Song lens listens: its body — a displaced, ember-lit orb — moves with the frequency bands of whatever is playing. Sound is off until you turn it on.
05Who made this
The Lattice is designed, written, composed, and maintained by wxza. There is no team, no company, and no product behind it. It is an argument, in one file, that the smallest unit of history is two hands meeting.
06How it is built
The entire application is one HTML file: Canvas 2D rendering, the Web Audio API, the anime.js animation engine, and — for a single surface, the Song lens orb — three.js. It installs as a progressive web app and works offline after the first visit. There is no framework, no build step, no database, and no tracking. The full dataset and its rules are documented in Dataset & methodology.