This is the second version of this cartridge. Next door (toggle 1987 · 1.1 in the menu bar) is the original — Adobe Illustrator 1.0/1.1, January 1987, one-bit black & white, a wireframe edit window and a separate preview.
You are now in the same vector program eight years later: Illustrator 5.5 "Janus," 1994 — the version Phil first used around 1995. The difference is everything the curve grew into: colour, layers, gradients, blends, the Pathfinder, filters, and an editable colour preview you draw straight into.
The 1987 ⟷ 1994 selector is the WRDZ/UNRSN idea, cut down to two lit tabs: the same tool, two eras, one toggle.
Between 1.1 and 5.5 the program gained almost everything a designer thinks of as "Illustrator." Illustrator 88 brought colour preview, Pantone, blends. 3.0 (1990) put type on a path and graphs. 5.0 (1993, "Saturn") was the leap: editable preview on the Mac, the colour-coded Layers palette, multi-stop gradients, the direct-selection arrow, compound paths, Create Outlines, and the plug-in Filter architecture (Pathfinder, distort, stylize).
5.5 (1994, "Janus") polished it for print — tabs, rows & columns, trapping. 6.0 (1996) added the paint-bucket and a Photoshop-style path UI; this room deliberately stops just before that, at the version people loved.
Open Window ▸ Show Colour (⌘I). The 1987 room could only print black; this one is a CMYK program — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black sliders, the print model the whole industry ran on. An RGB mode is here too for the screen.
Pick Fill or Stroke, drag a slider, or grab a swatch from the well. Borrowing a trick from FreeHand: you can drag a swatch straight onto an object on the canvas. The main window is now editable colour preview — what you see is what prints. ⌘E still drops to the old Artwork wireframe.
Window ▸ Show Gradient. Build a linear or radial fill with as many colour stops as you like — drag the stops, set the angle, recolour. The Gradient tool drags across an object to set the angle and length (for a radial, the off-centre hot spot — the thing that was "utterly unique to Illustrator" in 1993).
The Blend tool clicks object A, then object B, and asks for a number of steps. It interpolates both shape and colour — the in-between made mechanical. It is how you get a row of nested rings, or a smooth shaded form, before transparency existed.
Window ▸ Show Layers. Each layer carries a colour; objects you select show their anchors in their layer's colour. Show/hide, lock, reorder, rename. The 1987 room had only z-order — Bring to Front, Send to Back.
Filter ▸ Pathfinder combines shapes: Unite, Intersect, Exclude, Minus Front/Back, Divide. (Shift-click to select two or more first.) Object ▸ Compound Path makes a donut hole; Create Outlines turns type into editable paths. The Distort, Colours and Stylize filters do the rest — Roughen, Twirl, Punk & Bloat, Round Corners, Drop Shadow.
This is a reconstruction, not a relic. Where the era's other great vector program — Macromedia FreeHand (4/5) — simply did something better, we grafted it in, and we say so.
The biggest is the lens fill: real Illustrator 5.5 had no transparency. FreeHand's lens gave you transparency, multiply, lighten, darken — the translucent overlaps you see when two circles cross. (It is exactly what Kandinsky's Circles within a Circle needs.) Also from FreeHand: drag-a-swatch colour, the spiral and knife tools, the freehand Pencil (drag a smoothed path into being), and an Eyedropper (click a shape to lift its paint and drop it on the selection). The paint-bucket and the Photoshop-style path UI of 6.0 we still leave out.
Every tool in the box is now live, not a label. The Scale, Rotate, Reflect and Shear tools work the Illustrator way: select an object, click once to drop the point of origin (the little ✛), then drag to transform around it in real time — double-click the tool icon for the numeric box. The Direct-Selection arrow grabs not just anchor points but their bézier handles — drag a control point to reshape a curve, Option-click an anchor to delete it. Between the Pen, the Pencil, the shape tools, the transforms, the Pathfinder and the filters, you can sit down and actually draw something.
This room can operate itself. Choose Help ▸ Perform — watch it work (Esc stops). A cursor moves across the real interface — picking tools, pulling menus, dragging palettes, zooming — and draws original compositions in the spirit of Kandinsky, then animates them. It is meant to look human: hesitation, mistakes-and-undo, overpainting, changing its mind.
And, in full 1994 spirit, the Mac sometimes crashes mid-work — the bomb dialog, the watch cursor, a restart — and carries on.
Under the hood is a scriptable interface, window.AI55: every shape, colour, gradient, blend and Pathfinder op can be driven from outside. The performance is just one script.
The performance is built to do one more thing: visualize music. The same self-operating cursor — choosing tools, drawing, scaling and rotating shapes — will run in step with a Nobject song, painting an original picture across the length of a track.
That is why the compositions are named from Sloterdijk's Bubbles — Sphere, Membrane, Dyad, Placenta, Companion, Foam — the philosophical spine of the Nobject record. A 1994 drawing program, taught to perform an album. The Nobject-specific version forks from here.
Everything above still rides on the same machinery as 1987: the cubic Bézier curve, invented twice in secrecy at two French car companies. The pen tool is unchanged; colour, layers and gradients are scaffolding around it.
Hear the source papers read aloud in CANON · 001B — → track 05 · Bézier · de Casteljau · 1959–68 — and the tween that became the Blend tool in → CANON3 · track 11 · the blend.
If you want to draw a Bézier curve in the air instead of on a screen, the room next door is Trace — a hand pinching in front of a webcam.