Basket Empty
Location: uncertain.
Weather: probably damp.
Boots: absent.
Torch: absent.
Big coat: regrettably absent.
Operational planning has failed.
I may be here a while.
Ritual Descent: Emergence started with a fairly sensible question:
Could I build a digital space around decentralised movement, collective behaviour and order without authority?
So I built one.
It went under a reservoir.
The project became a journey beneath Blackwater Reservoir, built around procedural movement, boids, submerged structures and systems that organise themselves without a leader.
A lot of what interests me about it is the point where something obviously programmed begins to appear as though it has intentions of its own.
I also built a set of audio engines for Emergence, designed to layer, drift, react and mutate rather than simply sit underneath the visuals as a conventional soundtrack.
Some of that machinery has now escaped.
Oweynagat started with a different question:
Could I fake a convincing journey through a cave in Pixi.js using fractal layers, 2D animation and enough visual trickery to make the brain accept depth where there technically isn’t much?
The starting point was really a rendering experiment.
Layered fractal forms. Forward movement. Fake depth. Trying to find the point where a collection of flat animated surfaces stops looking like graphics and starts feeling like somewhere you could actually enter.
Visually, it pulls from PS1-era graphics, pixelation, broken textures, glitch art and that strange point where low-resolution digital spaces stop feeling crude and start feeling physical.
I’ve also taken some of the audio engines I built for Ritual Descent and pushed them somewhere much stranger.
Less submerged reservoir, more impossible cave.
Shifting drones. Fractured echoes. Repeated sounds arriving wrong. Things apparently happening much further underground than current geology permits.
I remember first hearing about Oweynagat, the Cave of the Cats at Rathcroghan, and the mythology surrounding it in a podcast.
It apparently lodged somewhere in the back of my head until required.
I’ve never actually been there.
Possibly an advantage.
I know the place through photographs, references, stories and mythology rather than through trying to reproduce somewhere I’ve physically experienced.
So this is not really a reconstruction of Oweynagat.
It is becoming an imagined threshold built out of code, folklore, fractured sound and machinery borrowed from Emergence.
The two projects are connected, but they arrived from opposite directions.
Emergence began with an idea and slowly found the technology it needed.
Oweynagat began with the technology, then accidentally found a mythology.
One project began with an idea and found a machine.
The next began with a machine and appears to have found the Otherworld.
No coat.
Further investigation required. 🖤