Anunad Studio anunad.studio

Studio notebook · 2026

अनुनाद anunād, noun. Resonance; process of matching to each other's rhythm.

I'm Gaurav Bilolikar. Most days I spend wondering about what I am, why I exist and what is the “right” thing to do.

Often, I fall into thought patterns of symbiosis, co-existence, a dance of systems trying to change each other in various ways, synchronizing each other's existence in a process that creates novelty and increasing complexity. More in §1

Introducing MicroSnap. A microscope game about what lives in a drop of pond water, a microcosmos. Notes in §2

§1Why

Anunad is the Sanskrit word for resonance. To me it means coherence: things syncing up, systems that keep changing each other over time. The cells of one body cooperating. A fungus and an alga living as a lichen. And lately, I think, the bio world and the tech world starting to resonate with each other.

I find the systems we currently call artificial neural networks are sort of a new partner in this dance. A dance of us changing them and they changing us. Co-creators of a dynamic nature, and partners in the creative expression of whatever it is to be this being that I am part of.

I have been doing this for a few years, using LLMs, image, video and audio generation models to make songs and stories about philosophy and existential thoughts, trying to distill ideas from my mind that I can hardly articulate into songs that celebrate them. Now Anunad Studio is my more polished attempt at making creative projects and games with AI, trying to push the boundaries of creative expression, find novel ways to experience the world, and understand my place in it.

YouTube · @GauravBilolikarInstagram · @artistic_biologist

Every dot has its own pace, and each one pulls a little on all the others.

Pull hard enough and they sync up. Keep an eye on the fireflies.

Kc 0.56
Plate I. Forty coupled oscillators, the model Yoshiki Kuramoto wrote down in 1975.1 The arrow (r) gets longer as they move together. The fireflies are the same forty, and each one flashes when it passes θ = 0. Drag the coupling below the red mark and they lose each other again.

§2Work

MicroSnap

In development · Android first, iPad later

You get a drop of pond water and a microscope. Focus up and down through the drop, change objectives, and photograph whatever you find living in it. Fifty-one species are in so far, Paramecium, rotifers and tardigrades among them.

I've tried to make each one move the way it really does. A Vorticella yanks its stalk into a coil in under ten milliseconds, then takes a few seconds to stretch back out. Volvox rolls along as it swims. Each photo goes into a field guide next to a real micrograph and a line from one of the naturalists who saw it long before us.

“This was to me a very pleasant sight, because the said particles, as often as I did look on them, did never lye still, and that their motion did proceed from their turning round”

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, on Volvox, 1700

MicroSnap is dedicated to him. He was a cloth merchant in Delft who made his own microscopes, each one barely more than a bead of glass, and pointed them at pond water. In 1674 he wrote to the Royal Society about tiny animals swimming in it. As far as we know, nobody had seen them before. He kept looking, and kept writing letters about what he saw, for almost fifty years.

Phil. Trans. 22: 511 (1700). The spelling is his.

A green Micrasterias desmid, shaped like a cut paper snowflake, lying among spiral algal filaments and smaller cells under brightfield light. In-game render. 100 µm

Micrasterias rotata, one cell. 230 to 300 µm long, two mirror halves. Coesel & Meesters 2007

Spirogyra. The chloroplast is a ribbon wound in a helix inside each cell.

  1. 1Micrasterias rotata, one cell. 230 to 300 µm long, two mirror halves.
  2. 2Spirogyra. The chloroplast is a ribbon wound in a helix.
Plate II. A desmid among Spirogyra filaments, brightfield, from MicroSnap. The scale bar is estimated from the width of the cell.
A trumpet-shaped blue Stentor stretched out among spiral filaments and bits of detritus.
Fig. 1Stentor, specimen view. 0.5 to 2 mm when stretched out. The blue is a pigment, stentorin.
Copepods, rotifers and algae glowing white against a black background under darkfield light.
Fig. 2A crowded drop, darkfield. Light comes in at a slant, so only what scatters it shows up.
A single Volvox colony, a hollow green sphere with daughter colonies inside, on a black background.
Fig. 3Volvox, darkfield. The colony turns about once every six seconds (Drescher et al. 2009).
A tardigrade climbing over a spiral algal filament, seen in the 3D specimen view.
Fig. 4Tardigrade on Spirogyra, specimen view. Real ones are 200 to 350 µm long and walk about 163 µm a second (Nirody et al. 2021).

All pictures in this section are renders from the game, not photographs.

§3Method

Every creature in MicroSnap starts out as a list of papers: where its size came from, its shape, how it swims. The field guide borrows lines from Leeuwenhoek's letters2 and from H. S. Jennings' 1906 book on how small animals behave,3 both long out of copyright. Each real micrograph is credited to the person who took it.

I make all of this with AI. I bring the questions and I have the final say. It reads papers, writes a lot of the code and checks my facts. I check its facts too.

I called it a studio rather than a games company on purpose. Games first, probably, but I want to leave room for apps and whatever else comes along.

n 2 · m 3
n 1 · m 4
n 3 · m 5
n 2 · m 7
Fig. 5Chladni figures for a square plate. Sand on a vibrating plate gathers along the lines that stay still. Ernst Chladni made these patterns in 1787 by drawing a violin bow along the edge of a brass plate. These four are drawn from the standard formula for a free-edged plate.
  1. Kuramoto, Y. (1975) Self-entrainment of a population of coupled non-linear oscillators. In International Symposium on Mathematical Problems in Theoretical Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 39: 420–422. Springer.
  2. Leeuwenhoek, A. van. Letters to the Royal Society, printed in Philosophical Transactions from 1673.
  3. Jennings, H. S. (1906) Behavior of the Lower Organisms. New York: Columbia University Press.

§4Contact

hello@anunad.studio

YouTube · @anunad.studioYouTube · @GauravBilolikarInstagram · @artistic_biologist

Questions, bugs, photos of a good pond. It all lands in one inbox, and I read it.