Infinite Canvas

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

import Callout from '../../components/mdx/Callout.astro'; import LinkCard from '../../components/mdx/LinkCard.astro'; This site doesn't have pages. Not in the traditional sense. There's no blog archive sorted by date, no linear scroll from top to bottom, no hierarchy telling you what matters most. Instead, there's a canvas - an open field where content exists in space, positioned by semantic relationship rather than chronology. This was a deliberate choice, and it took me a while to articulate why. ## Pages are arguments A traditional webpage is a rhetorical structure. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It controls attention through sequence. The designer decides: this goes first, this comes next, this is the conclusion. That's powerful when you want to persuade. It's limiting when you want to think. I spent years as a UX researcher testing interfaces that impose hierarchy. Navigation menus. Content carousels. Information architecture. All of these are opinionated about what matters - they rank, they sort, they filter. They're useful. But they also compress the space of possible engagement into predetermined paths. An infinite canvas doesn't argue. It presents. When you organize content by date, you're saying recency equals relevance. When you organize by category, you're saying taxonomy equals understanding. When you organize by spatial proximity, you're saying relationship equals meaning. ## Maps over timelines The digital garden movement got close to this. Maggie Appleton's concept of ideas growing from seeds to saplings to trees is beautiful - it captures the epistemic status of thoughts, which blogs flatten into "published" or "not." Andy Matuschak's evergreen notes push further: atomic ideas linked by association rather than sequence. But most digital gardens still live inside page-based layouts. You click links. You navigate trees. The topology is relational, but the interface is still linear. Kinopio does something different - it gives you cards in space, connected by lines. You see the shape of someone's thinking, not the sequence of their output. That spatial dimension carries real information. Clusters mean resonance. Distance means distinction. Orphaned nodes mean ideas that haven't found their place yet. That's what I wanted for baki.io. Not a portfolio. Not a blog. A map of how I think. ## What spatial organization reveals When I placed my projects on the canvas for the first time, patterns emerged that I hadn't seen in two years of working on them. Chaos and the Fractal Game share a deep concern with emergence - but I'd never connected them explicitly. The MCP aggregator and the infinite canvas itself are both about interface philosophy - tools that shape how you interact with complexity. These connections were always there. A chronological blog would have buried them under timestamps. A portfolio grid would have separated them into categories. The canvas made them visible. Try this: take five projects you've worked on and place them on a whiteboard by "how related they feel." The clusters will surprise you. There's something meditative about it. You stop curating a narrative and start observing a landscape. The map isn't the territory, but sometimes the map shows you territory you didn't know existed.

baki.io - thoughts from the void

Infinite Canvas