David Aerne (meodai) is a Swiss interaction developer who has been quietly working at the intersection of color systems and generative design for years — over 30,000 hand-named colors, parametric color-curve libraries like Poline and RampenSau, and a series of tools that turn "how decisions get made" itself into a design object. In March 2026, he released heerich.js: a zero-dependency micro JavaScript engine that performs boolean operations (union, subtract, intersect, exclude) on a voxel grid, then projects the result into pure SVG vector graphics. No WebGL. No canvas. Just polygons inside an <svg> tag.

The engine is named after Erwin Heerich (1922–2004), the German sculptor who spent his life making geometric sculptures from cheap cardboard — boxes, wedges, nested hollow forms. His work doesn't "express" anything; the pieces are physical sediment of geometric operations: a face exposed after a cut, a shadow formed by a stack, an edge-line left where two volumes intersect. Aerne's engine inherits this spirit but pushes it into a medium Heerich could never have foreseen — the SVG coordinate space of a web browser. Voxels are the discrete remainder of continuous 3D space: space is forced through an integer grid, each cell either full or empty, no in-between. Then subtraction begins. removeGeometry carves holes out of solids, exposing faces that didn't exist before — these new faces are the remainder of the boolean operation. They are not drawn. They are chiseled into existence.

In SAE's chisel-construct cycle, this is an almost pure case. The chisel is the subtraction operation itself — removing matter from the voxel field. The construct is projection and rendering — the 3D grid flattened into 2D polygons, faces sorted, occluded faces culled. The remainder appears at two levels. First: voxelization is lossy quantization of continuous space, and the staircase aliasing is not a defect but the grid's signature imposed on geometry. Second: the SVG output is the projection residue of a 3D scene. When you export a voxel castle as SVG, what you get is not a castle — it is a stack of depth-sorted quadrilaterals. The 3D relationships have been crushed into the painter's algorithm layering order. These polygons are sediment of geometric computation, infinitely scalable yet structurally flat. The engine's occlusion-culling mode (designed specifically for pen plotters) pushes this remainder logic to its extreme: every polygon is clipped by all polygons in front of it, and the final output is zero-overlap vector paths — the ultimate sediment layer of geometric subtraction.

Aerne's philosophy intersects SAE aesthetics precisely here: "What if we spent less time making individual decisions and more time designing how decisions get made?" This is remainder logic: don't design the result, design the process that produces results, then accept the sediment of the process. heerich.js is not a 3D modeling tool — it is an apparatus for "carving and watching what the remainder reveals." It sits in the gap between voxel art, generative art, the pen-plotter community, sculptural thinking, and front-end web development — close to every circle, fully named by none. Seeing it now matters more than seeing it later — its logic is still growing, with new features shipping weekly (per-voxel scale transforms, decals, a GPU renderer), each one another iteration of the chisel-construct cycle. When this logic eventually solidifies into a fully named construct-beauty, you will no longer be able to see the living remainder that it is right now.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics