Synthesis: The Unfinished Cast
My thesis made accountability tangible through receipts, but trapped it inside stationery and small, self-contained performances. Designer A brought stronger causal choreography and a shared sonic palette, but still treated governance as something to illustrate with instruments, stamps and latches. The Unfinished Cast keeps legibility, causality and evidence, while rejecting the sealed object: the site becomes a monumental clay sculpture that cannot finish authoring itself. The visitor can deform its presentation, separate its dependencies and leave impressions that subsequent scenes must accommodate, without the site pretending those interactions establish truth.
The governing idea
The contradiction becomes the experience. Axiom can be spectacular precisely because its spectacle does not get the last word. In scene 02, a button contests the composition itself: the imposing orange mass opens, exposing another material underneath. The statement remains unchanged. The record distinguishes a challenged presentation from a disproved claim.
This is a motion prototype, not an operational governance interface. Its controls say what they actually do. Consent switches are explicitly material demonstrations, contact rehearsal sends no message, and the archive contains actual local interaction events rather than invented organisational evidence. Before interaction, the page discloses its temporary memory. Reset and download remain available.
Twelve movements, not twelve containers
Every scene occupies the page width, sharing one full-viewport rendering surface. The clay crosses scene boundaries through an interpolated distance field. Orange denotes intervention, blue denotes response, and cream provides reading light, not certification.
The opening is an enormous breathing clay aperture behind the complete hero sentence. The second spectacle splits that seemingly authoritative body. Custody then offers a slower, dentable surface. Uncertainty makes absence physically substantial through a hollow volume, without pretending to visualise publication counts. Independent bodies let the orange decision move without dragging the blue record into agreement. One source grows a branching volume from a small common origin.
The murmuration is the third expansive spectacle: shaded clay grains occupy the viewport and respond to the visitor’s position. Three independent demonstration switches influence separate populations. No microphone is requested. Pressure archive converts the accumulated local events into a growing sculpture and exposes their readable record. Voluntary gravity is the fourth spectacle: joining changes the material’s gravitational relationship; leaving separates the visitor’s body but retains an impression. Passing matter makes the section transition a physical fold. Invitation warms rather than magnetically displacing its control. The final cast resolves into a cream object carrying the latest impressions, alongside an export of the complete local record.
Motion and material
The implementation uses a raw WebGL signed-distance field for actual rounded depth, broad specular light, occlusion, warm edge transmission and fine procedural grain. The flock uses cached, shaded canvas sprites. There are no image assets.
Three numerical spring presets govern heavy entry, responsive deformation and cursor lean. Contact injects velocity rather than selecting a canned easing curve. Replay repeats the entrance without erasing previous actions. Slow breathing and moving illumination continue only while the shared stage is visible; scrolling changes the light angle. Different spatial operations supply rhythm: opening, dividing, hollowing, separating, branching, gathering, stacking and releasing.
The score
One shared AudioContext starts only after Sound or an audition button is pressed. The identity is D minor pentatonic, using rounded sine and filtered triangle voices. A quiet, slowly spaced harmonic bed supports a recurring D–A–F gesture. Each movement varies its register, spacing and density rather than introducing another unrelated effect.
Actions add notes to the same harmony. The final cast answers the recurring gesture with a descending phrase and a sustained D-minor resolution. A bounded waveshaper followed by a 0.14 output gain limits the signal. Sound begins off; audition does not enable the continuous score. Hidden tabs silence scheduled voices. Reduced motion also suppresses automatic entrance cues.
Real-page choreography
On the home page, use 01 and 02 as the opening declaration and its challenge, then leave the introductory prose untouched and quiet. Scene 10 hands into the four principles, using 03 through 06 with progressively smaller production footprints and long reading intervals. Scene 07 is the next full-width peak. Its separate decisions stay adjacent to their original disclosure. Scene 08 supplies an optional local record, not a permanent scrolling distraction. Scene 11 introduces contact, and 12 closes with a retained cast.
On Human in the Harness, begin with a restrained version of 09 beside the original title treatment. Put the full joining and leaving interaction beside the harness passage, with retention disclosure visible before activation. Keep essay paragraphs still. Use 10 only at a genuine structural break; finish with 12 and then the unchanged contact copy.
Shipping, performance and access
Ship one CSS and one JS motion layer attached through explicit data-motion hooks. Existing copy remains selectable semantic HTML; decorative canvases are hidden from assistive technology. No text-signature rewriting is required.
The prototype shares one renderer, caps rendering resolution, reduces it under sustained frame pressure, and uses visibility observation plus tab lifecycle handling. A canvas fallback preserves material depth without WebGL. Production acceptance includes profiling on a mid-range phone rather than promising universal frame rates.
Keyboard controls duplicate pointer effects. Touch never requires dragging. Reduced motion renders settled compositions, disables cursor response and stops animation loops while preserving immediate state changes. Font failure, audio failure and rendering failure must never conceal the copy.