Made by a person, for curious encounters.

The work moves between drawings, playful systems, interactive characters, real-time images and places you can enter, touch or change. A small reaction can change an encounter. A familiar object might hesitate, answer back or behave differently the next time you meet it.

Some pieces are games, some are experiments, and others are still becoming. The practice values unfinished questions as much as finished works, and keeps a clear line between sketches, public experiments and released projects.

How the beings are made

Each one begins as an ink drawing in a sketchbook. A photo of the page is traced into separate strokes, and every stroke becomes one piece of a creature that can wake, move, rest and react. Every piece of the creature is a stroke from the page. Dates, page numbers and anything written on the facing page are left out of the tracing.

Everything around the creature is a stage made in code: the desk, the doodles and the pencilled date on the facing page, the paper cranes, the bugs and the fireflies. They are not from the sketchbook.

What these pieces notice

The line is art that notices you, so it is worth saying exactly what that means here. The beings respond to:

• your pointer or touch, while you play with them;
• your breath, only if you switch on Breath. The microphone's loudness is read live in the page; nothing is recorded or sent;
• tilt and shake, only if you switch them on, on a phone;
• your past visits, remembered on your device only. "Forget me" clears what every being remembers; if you keep playing, they start remembering again;
• the time on your device's clock, which sets the light.

They do not use your camera, and they do not know who you are. Responses are made by simple rules running in your browser. Nothing here is aware, however much it may seem so.

Visits to the site are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, does not follow you to other sites, and is separate from the pieces themselves.

Elsewhere

Research in social XR, creative technology and professional work lives at timothiellim.com.