"Frank" is a long-form generative art project inspired by the fascinating "Diary of Anne Frank", one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
Built entirely in P5JS — without photographs, scans, textures, shaders, or external assets — "Frank" explores the possibility of creating images that feel remembered rather than documented.
Rather than illustrating the events of the diary, this project explores the feelings that live between its pages: confinement, repetition, waiting, uncertainty, and the quiet awareness of a world just beyond reach.
The supply: 163 artworks
The collection consists of 163 unique works, one for each diary entry written during Anne Frank's years in hiding. Every piece is titled with the date of its corresponding entry, transforming each output into the algorithmic equivalent of a single day.
The material: Concrete
The visual language of "Frank" is built almost entirely from concrete.
Concrete carries many associations. It can evoke shelters, bunkers, concentration camps, and the architecture of totalitarian regimes. But at the same time, concrete is celebrated by the Brutalist architects and contemporary designer, who celebrate the majestic beauty of this material.
In "Frank", concrete becomes both surface and metaphor. Stains, cracks, erosion, and subtle tonal shifts create walls that feel weathered by years of quiet observation. Each image appears as a fragment of an unknown room — a space that has witnessed days passing without ever revealing its story.
Light: The passing of time
Light is a central actor in this artwork. A beam enters through an unseen window and slowly travels across the surface before fading away again. Nothing dramatic happens. No characters appear. No narrative unfolds. The work simply watches time pass. The artwork becomes a timelapse of a whole day passing by.
For someone living in confinement, small changes become significant. A shifting shadow, a patch of sunlight, a distant sound. Tiny reminders that life continues elsewhere.
The light in "Frank" points toward that unseen world. It suggests places beyond the frame, experiences beyond reach, and moments that disappear as soon as they arrive.
A form of nostalgia for the present.
Anne's Handwriting
Anne Frank's iconic handwriting appear throughout the collection. Each character was individually extracted and digitalized from the original pages of the diary to create a full typeface, allowing the algorithm to write using her script. Each artwork is dated along the upper edge, echoing the way she began every entry in her diary.
The random confined walkers
At the heart of the project is a system of wandering movement and invisible boundaries.
Random paths drift through hidden architectural constraints, gradually revealing the contours of an unseen floor plan. These movements are not intended to simulate a place literally. Instead, they create a sense of motion without freedom, repetition without destination, and presence without visibility.
The rejection algorithm: The code becomes part of the narrative.
To maintain the walkers confined within the floor plan of the house, a code structure calle a "rejection algorithm" is used in this project. But this technical decision is also a conceptual one: Nazism itself was a political version os a "rejection algorithm", that maintained those people confined and eliminated them when they were found. The algorithm acquires here a truly conceptual meaning.
A universal message
"Frank" is not just about a past war. Unfortunately these realities still exist today. This algorithm carries a universal message, written in stone, light, ink, and code:
A call for tolerance.
And for freedom.
