Red The Ocean Around U

Billy was the lead developer and technical architect for the frontend and backend of the 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 website is the "Healing Spring", which generates an evolving AI environment in the browser in real-time. The experience is shared, with all users receiving a live feed of the environment, driven by communal interactions with the website. Each visitors mouse movements and narrative choices influence how the scene is generated. The healing spring is presented in the middle of the narrative, bookended by pre-generated videos by CROSSLUCID.

The project involved close collaboration with CROSSLUCID to deploy a custom serverless AI image generator for their AI image generation workflow. The AI is fed many user inputs from the front-end to drive the image generation. It has several short-term and long-term memories, containing various texts and symbols, which accumulate over the project's lifetime.

"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

Billy developed the website using Next.js, RunPod, Three.js, and Supabase.

There is a unique, downloadable PDF version, generated in the browser, of the narrative arc the user chose at the end of the user journey.