unfold
interactive browser artwork, 2026
by nicola harvey
live at https://unfold.herfrontier.com

it begins as one point of light, breathing in the dark. touched, it unfolds. branches reach, signals travel, small lives arrive and follow the light, weather moves through, and every place you touch is remembered as a constellation of your own making. some grown points hold whole further worlds, and each of those begins, again, as a single point. step far enough back and the thousands of moving pieces gather into one golden-angle disc, then into the very point you first met, while the layered sound settles into a single chord. the idea the work wants you to feel in your hands: complexity is simplicity unfolding, and simplicity is complexity seen whole.

every world grows by an algorithm borrowed from living systems. some spread like the veins of a leaf, claiming scattered ground as they reach it. some stand and lean toward the light like trees, their limbs thinning at every fork the way leonardo observed in real wood. some wander and connect like mycelium. each visit mints a new world with its own name, and any name regrows its world exactly, so a world can be left, returned to, and known. the sound is grown the same way the image is, and the two agree about distance: come close and the music separates into individual voices, step back and it gathers into one chord.

the work runs as a single self-contained file. no engine, no libraries, no network, no recorded media. every pixel and every note is grown live by code written for this piece.

the work was authored and directed by nicola harvey and built with an AI coding agent as the instrument. it contains no generated images and no generated audio.
