When you slice these beetles, the halves play Ableton

The rule of the sketch is a moral: "If you seek to harm then your problems will only multiply." Slice one of Noland Chaliha's procedural beetles and it refuses to die—it splits into clones, each carrying its own procedural MIDI note, piped live out of the browser and into Ableton. Toy, instrument and parable at once play out in the video.

The technical footing is worth noticing. Chaliha, a creative technologist and educator who posts as alwayscodingsomething, wrote the sketch in p5.webgpu.js, the experimental WebGPU renderer that now ships alongside p5.js 2.2—the Processing Foundation's bet on keeping browser art current for the next decade.

A sketch with rules this legible—cut, multiply, harmonize—reads as one whether or not it ever ships, which is the same lesson we took from Indira Ardolic's live-coding performances last year and from the no-skill audiovisual instruments we loved a decade ago: when a system responds this generously, playing it and playing with it are the same act. The beetles have no ship date. The instrument already works.