Stumbling upon this nice quote by John Cage, I wanted to capture the echoing of nothing.
For the extending wave I used a cellular automaton representation - this approach seems to be published originally as Komatsuzaki T., Iwata Y., Morishita S. (2012) Modelling of Incident Sound Wave Propagation around Sound Barriers Using Cellular Automata. In: Sirakoulis G.C., Bandini S. (eds) Cellular Automata. ACRI 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7495. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Thankfully I found a python implementation of this method in https://github.com/Alexander3/wave-propagation that I used as basis for a translation to Kotlin.
With that, I used the shape of nothing as starting excitation for the waves that in turn later illuminate the rest of the quote.
In playing with different colorings, I also created the ‘glitched’ version below where the text color starts as the background color - but I think the temporary visibility of the full quote with the remaining nothing is fascinating in its own way.