Why do similar folk motifs appear across distant cultures?

Audiovisual work that takes its own title as both question and constructed answer. Built on reaction–diffusion—the same mathematical process that patterns animal skin and coral—the piece proposes a logic that appears to explain recurring visual forms across unrelated cultures. The visuals enact this claim: the title text is gradually consumed by the simulation, morphing through leopard spots into patterns that resemble Romanian embroidery, Central Asian carpets, and pre-Columbian ornament, before dissolving back into abstraction. These transformations suggest continuity, coherence, and origin—yet remain entirely synthetic. Sound is produced using a custom instrument built in SuperCollider and p5.js that translates the same reaction–diffusion process into audio. The sound reinforces the sense of structure across perception, making the system appear consistent and legible. Rather than offering an explanation, the work constructs one. It demonstrates how easily pattern becomes evidence, and how coherence—across image, sound, and narrative—can be mistaken for truth. The work is the audiovisual companion to the paper “Algorithmic Archaeology of Folk Motifs: Nature, Code, and Cultural Memory”, presented at the Algorithmic Pattern Conference in the Creative Arts (ALPACA) 2025. Screened as part of Overdrive|5 Festival, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York (2026).