Red The Ocean Around U

Billy was the lead developer and technical architect for the frontend and backend of the browser-based computational art project Red The Ocean Around U. The project was created by CROSSLUCID and commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. The visual design for the site was led by Felix Luke.

The main feature of the project is the Healing Spring. This section of the site generates an evolving AI environment in the visitors web browser in real-time. It is a shared experience, with all active users receiving a live feed of the environment. Each visitor's mouse movements and narrative choices influence how the scene generates. The Healing Spring is presented in the middle of the user journey, bookended by pre-generated videos by CROSSLUCID and the final downloadable PDF narrative.

The project involved close collaboration with CROSSLUCID to deploy a serverless version of ComfyUI, an AI image generator software. The AI is fed many user inputs from the frontend to drive the image generation. It has several short-term and long-term memories, containing various texts and symbolic elements, which accumulate over the project's lifetime and influence the visual and narrative output. There is a unique, downloadable PDF version of the narrative arc that the individual user chose at the end of the user journey.

Billy developed the frontend in Next.js, using libraries including Three.js, GSAP, React PDF, with the backend built in Python and Node.js. Backend services include MUX, RunPod, and Supabase.

"Red the Ocean Around U proposes a non-linear narrative through an interactive and generative digital environment. The visitors are invited to participate on a journey through those oneiric landscapes, which will lead them to multiple endings. No pathway is the same. The story grows with their interactions. The visitor becomes U, a character who has to decide whether to adopt or return two stolen creatures. U is guided by the questions of Claude, an otherworldly character, itself a Large Language Model (LLM)." - LAS Art Foundation