HONGXI DESIGN
"The Gap"
“The Gap” is an interactive web page, also, a gray zone between reality and the Internet enclaves. It is formed by people's fear of reality and protects the existence of enclaves. Here, the data of people's activities in the Internet enclave are translated into the ecosphere of the place, which determines the plates, the terrains and the creatures -- monsters.
These monsters are the figurative embodiment of people's fears of reality, and because of the inescapability of reality, I want to try to provide a buffer for people when they return to reality from the Internet enclave, even if it is only to present these unspeakable fears in a figurative way.
Date
Feb. - May 2023
Category
Game Design
Interaction Design
Key workds
Creative Coding
Data Visualization
p5.js
Other Information
Individual Project
An inquiry into reality
What is an enclave?
An enclave is a piece of land that is part of an administrative district but not contiguous to it.
In this world, people have built various spiritual enclaves on the Internet in order to escape from all the fears brought about by facing the real world. There is an invisible grey zone that separates the enclave from real world like a moat.
This moat is made of people's fear of reality —— without people's fears of reality, there would be no enclaves; also, these fears protect the enclaves from the real world.
Can enclaves solve the problems?
This gap between enclave and reality makes it difficult for people to return to the real world and leads to a greater reliance on the psychological comfort of the enclave and ultimately a vicious circle.
Can enclaves solve the problems?
There is no buffer when people return to reality from the enclave, so there is a huge psychological contrast, which makes people more dependent on the enclave.
Goal
Many of the problems from the real world cannot be solved and fears cannot be dispelled in the enclaves. I wanted to provide some sort of buffer when returning from the enclave to reality, or at least a chance for the fear of the unknown to be perceived.
“The Gap”
Enclave - STEAM Community
The various types of information in the enclave represent people's interactions in the enclave, and, to some extent, their perception of reality. People's fears of reality pile up as more and more interactions in the enclave are projected in “The Gap”.
This data will become the feed for these monsters born out of fear and feeding on fear in the gap. Also, different types of data affect different characteristics of monsters, such as the type of enclave affects the type of monster, the amount of data affects how much the monster grows , and people's heart rate data affects their behaviour.
What is in “The Gap”?
Monsters fed by people's fears are active in "the gap", where plates and terrains are generated by data from people's interactions in internet enclaves.
The shape of the plates is derived from the distribution of the number of interactions people have in different enclaves.
Coding！
Plates & Terrains
Monsters
Step into "The Gap"
