# The SVG eye mark

> The first eye was a logo: two rings, an arc and a pupil that follows the cursor, redrawn once for each era. It set the idea that one thing can be seen through many screens.

- URL: https://www.kiruk.in/making/svg-eye-mark
- Kind: Interface
- Made: May 2026
- Author: Arun Kumaar Sreenivasan
- Part of: How this was made (https://www.kiruk.in/making)
- Agent file: https://www.kiruk.in/making/svg-eye-mark/agent.md

**Six of the ten marks, running as they did in May.** Each keeps the same silhouette and changes only the way it is drawn.

## What it was

Plain SVG and a spring. The pupil's position came from the cursor, and each era had its own small component that drew the same four shapes in its own manner: phosphor cells, a 1-bit bitmap, a hyperlink, candy gel, a flat icon.

The first-visit screen was a row of these. You scrolled along it and picked a year.

## What it left behind

Two things carried into every later eye. The first is the idea itself: the era is a way of drawing, and the subject stays the same. The second is the input. Sweep to travel through time, tap the eye to enter. The loader still works that way.

## Why it was not enough

A mark can look at you. It cannot be looked into. The picker needed something a visitor would stay with for a few seconds, and a logo is read in one.

## Lineage

### Led to

- [The shader eye](https://www.kiruk.in/making/glsl-eye) (Interface, Sep 2026): The second eye was a painting: one 850-line GLSL fragment shader that faked a whole eye in 2D on a full-screen quad. It found the idea of the page in the cornea, and then it hit its ceiling.