One System is an interactive piece split into two panels. The left shows a forest turning into a city as you drag a slider, while the right shows an anatomical human heart. As the city grows, the heart slows down. The ECG degrades from a normal rhythm through bradycardia, ischemia, and agonal beats, until it flatlines. However, the connection is not a metaphor; rather, tree roots and cardiac veins are the same structure. Both are branching networks that taper from thick trunks down to fine tips, moving resources through a living system. In fact, the code that draws the roots and the code that draws the coronary vessels are the same recursive function. The forest is a circulatory system: it moves water, carbon, and nutrients through the landscape the same way a heart moves oxygen through a body. So when the city replaces the forest, it is not replacing scenery, but rather, removing a circulatory system. The heart dying on the right is not symbolic: it is the logical consequence shown literally. The title refuses to separate the two panels. Most people look at a forest and a heart and see two unrelated things. This piece insists they are not. Each reload generates a different forest, but the ending is always the same. Medium: This is generative code art created using p5.js. The work was developed through iterative text-based prompting with Claude (Anthropic), with all visual logic (terrain generation, recursive root systems, anatomical heart construction, ECG waveform modeling) produced through a conversational generative process. Tools: Claude (Anthropic), p5.js, Web Audio API, HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Artist Bio: Deepika Sharma is a second-year Computer Science and Linguistics student at UCLA with minors in Mathematics and Data Science Engineering. Her academic and technical work includes full-stack development and technology consulting, but outside of that she enjoys creative coding and generative art as a hobby. Specifically, she enjoys projects that incorporate technology and nature, as she believes code can represent the life and death of nature really well. She has also taught coding to students ranging from elementary schoolers to high schoolers, worked in web development instruction, and built different coding projects. One System is one of those things: it started as a small observation about structure and kind of grew from there. Artist Statement: I’m a computer science student at UCLA interested in what happens when technical systems are used to ask non-technical questions. My artwork lives at the boundary between engineering and biology, using code as a way of thinking through how living systems are structured, how they fail, and what connects them across scale. One System started from a small observation that kept bothering me: the function I wrote to draw tree roots and the function I wrote to draw coronary arteries were the same algorithm: something I didn’t plan. I thought it was really cool that nature reuses this pattern everywhere: rivers, lungs, neurons, lightning. It’s essentially the same solution to the same problem of moving resources through a living network, repeated at every scale. The code just made that visible in a way I had not expected. This piece was built through iterative creative coding with Claude, an AI developed by Anthropic. Working this way changed how I think about authorship in generative art. I wasn’t composing an image, but rather, I was describing a system and refining its rules. The ECG, for example, is not an animation. It is sampled in real time from a physiological waveform function, so as the heart rate drops, the peaks on the monitor physically slow and spread apart the way they would on an actual cardiac display. Overall, I wanted the interaction to feel like a question rather than a demonstration. The slider gives the viewer agency, but the consequence is fixed. You can drag it back, and the forest returns. But for a moment, the monitor was flat, and I think that is something I think is worth sitting with.