If you're reading this away from my portfolio, picture a blurred human profile occupying the background of a dark screen. The figure resists immediate categorization by gender, ethnicity, or individual identity, and their eyes are closed while their expression remains calm and inward. Identifying details have been softened, but posture, light, and presence remain.

Across the portrait sits an orderly field of white nodes, and some illuminate in bright blue, red, green, and yellow while lines briefly form between neighboring points and disappear. Patterns grow, thin out, and begin again, and when you move toward one of the nodes, the field responds because your gesture becomes a new point of activity that sends life outward through the system.

The portrait remains still while the network continually changes, and although the composition may initially feel graphic, playful, or alive, nothing announces itself as artificial intelligence or explains the interaction before it begins. The visitor is invited to notice, move, and experiment before deciding what the work means.

That sequence matters to me because it's the difference between presenting an idea and creating the conditions for someone to enter it.

An idea waiting for its medium

The interactive artwork began years before I could build it properly.

Its earliest form was a grid of pill-shaped elements placed over a high-contrast photograph of a mountain, and I was attracted to the tension between the orderly graphic field and the irregular physical landscape underneath it. The image was visually striking, but visual impact alone wasn't enough.

I've never been comfortable adding motion, complexity, or spectacle simply to make a page appear more impressive. Those techniques can attract attention, and sometimes that's their job, but when a visual device occupies the central position on a homepage, I believe it should earn that attention by communicating something meaningful.

For several years, the idea remained unresolved, and although I explored versions of it and attempted to develop it with outside help, the result never quite matched what I could see in my mind. Eventually, I moved on from that version of the portfolio, but the concept remained.

The emergence of tools such as Framer and code-generating language models changed what was possible, allowing me, for the first time, to test a behavior, observe the result, describe what wasn't working, revise the logic, and continue until the piece began to feel right.

AI didn't originate the idea. It allowed me to remain close enough to the making of it to see the idea through.

That distinction is important because the piece wasn't conceived as a demonstration of artificial intelligence; AI was the material that finally allowed a much older idea to take form.

The human and the field

The portrait's ambiguity is intentional. By softening the identifying details while preserving posture, light, and expression, the figure becomes less about a particular person and more about human presence itself.

The image was also generated by AI, which creates a recursive relationship within the work: a human-made system generated the figure representing humanity, while a human designer placed that figure inside another human-made system.

The network's behavior is based on Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton in which a few local rules produce complex and unpredictable patterns. Each cell survives, dies, or becomes alive based on the state of its neighbors. When the field becomes sparse, activity is reseeded among the existing nodes. When a visitor hovers over, taps, or clicks a node, that interaction creates a new origin from which activity can spread.

The visitor can affect the system but can't command its outcome.

That's part of what makes the interaction feel alive. It isn't a predetermined animation that repeats identically for everyone; it's autonomous and responsive at the same time. The visitor enters the system, changes it, and becomes part of what happens next.

I consider anyone who enters a page a participant because even apparent observation is an action: someone chose to arrive, to look, to move, or to stay. In this piece, that participation becomes visible, and the interface reflects the visitor's presence back to them.

Networks, thought, and emergence

The network can be interpreted in several ways.

It resembles the hidden activity that begins when someone enters a website because a page request can initiate caching, analytics, data transfer, and communication between systems the visitor never sees, so one arrival can produce a chain of activity across a much larger network.

It can also resemble cognition, as one thought activates another, an image recalls a memory, and a memory forms an association, so ideas spread, fade, reappear, and connect in ways that are only partly deliberate.

And at its most basic, the Game of Life evokes growth, proximity, reproduction, decline, and renewal. It's entirely constructed—mathematical rules written by human beings—yet its behavior can feel organic.

We often describe technology as though it were separate from nature, but I don't experience it that way because humans created the network and humans are part of nature. Language, cities, institutions, software, and artificial intelligence are all products of the same species that builds communities, invents tools, and tells stories.

Technology isn't the opposite of humanity; it's one of humanity's expressions.

That belief is partly why the piece feels hopeful rather than dystopian, and the colors are bright and playful because that's part of my own visual language. I tend to use contrast—dark, restrained foundations interrupted by vivid color—to create energy and invitation, and although the network could easily have been rendered as cold, ominous, or clinical, I wanted it to feel approachable: serious, but not severe.

The role of play

Play isn't incidental to the interaction.

One of the earliest designed objects many people encounter is a toy, and before we understand interfaces or instruction manuals, we learn through touch, repetition, curiosity, and response. A toy invites participation before comprehension, so understanding develops through the act of using it.

That principle remains valuable in interaction design because a responsive surface acknowledges that a person is present, and a rollover state, a change of color, or a shift in behavior reflects the user's action back to them, so the interface becomes a kind of mirror for intention.

The homepage uses that basic relationship to create a small moment of surprise because the visitor discovers that the field responds, their movement produces a visible consequence, and they're invited to experiment without being given an instruction.

Playfulness, however, doesn't exempt the work from meaning because novelty fades quickly when it's disconnected from purpose, and I wanted the interaction to offer delight while remaining anchored in an idea: people enter systems, influence them, and form relationships through them.

Looking beyond the obvious

While developing the piece, I began researching the use of dot fields in art and graphic design, and John Baldessari's work became especially important.

Baldessari often placed colored dots over people's faces, and because the face—and particularly the eyes—normally attracts our attention first, obscuring it forces the viewer to look elsewhere. Clothing, posture, objects, setting, and composition become more visible, while the device interrupts an automatic reading and redirects attention toward details the viewer might otherwise ignore.

I wasn't interested in borrowing the dots as a stylistic signature; I was interested in the mechanism and in the ability of a visual intervention to change how someone looks.

A project often arrives as a visible request—a homepage, campaign, interface, service, or visual system—and research may identify tasks, friction points, and user needs. All of that is necessary, but the most important problem isn't always located on the surface.

I try to look through the visible system toward the person who must live with its consequences.

What relationship does the system create? Does it make someone feel capable or uncertain? Does it establish trust or suspicion? Does it welcome participation, or unintentionally exclude? Does it recognize the human being on the other side, or treat them as an abstraction?

On the homepage, the moving network attracts attention first, but the human remains behind it, visible but softened, so to see the person, the viewer must look through the system.

That's not only the visual idea behind the piece; it's the through-line of my work.

Art and overture

I think of the homepage piece as both an artwork and an overture.

As art, it doesn't resolve into one prescribed interpretation because the network can represent digital infrastructure, thought, social systems, web crawlers, emergence, or life itself. Some of those meanings were consciously embedded, while others became clearer through making, observation, and conversation.

That openness isn't a failure of communication; it's an invitation for the viewer to participate in meaning.

As an overture, the piece introduces ideas that recur throughout the portfolio: systems and people, participation and agency, rigor and play, technological possibility, communication, and the responsibility to keep the human visible inside complexity. The projects that follow don't share the same visual style, but they begin from the same ethic.

The network moves. The human remains.

The visitor enters, leaves an influence, and continues onward. The work succeeds not when every layer is consciously decoded, but when the interaction communicates before explanation: something playful and serious, technological and human, structured and alive.

Perhaps, after looking through the network, someone becomes curious about the person and the practice behind it—not because they were told what to think, but because the work gave them enough reason to keep looking.

The artwork gives that practice a visible form, while the experiences and professional choices behind it extend much further.