The making of this website has been a process of constant metamorphosis and evolution, beginning with an unrealized dream of four-elements-powered self-hosting: a server sustained by a solar panel, a small wind turbine, an algae bioreactor, and microbial fuel cells. The infrastructure itself would have been a manifestation of our work’s dependencies on energy, on materials, on planetary systems and of the ecological contradictions inherent in creative production.
The initial vision was an opening morphology, a first form in the organism’s evolution. Resource limits altered this trajectory and what emerged was transformation: an exploration of hybrid forms where infrastructural poetics replace hardware as the site of ecological embodiment.
We began asking ourselves: how can a website hosting posthuman and regenerative practices move beyond being a container to become a germinator—or better, a symbiont? How could the infrastructure itself manifest the interconnectedness it describes between humans, technology, and the environment?
The answer emerged in the decision to adopt infrastructural poetics: hand-coding every element in basic HTML and CSS and, only when strictly necessary, JavaScript. This approach allows us to maintain agency while transforming the site into what Donna Haraway would call a sympoietic system—making-with rather than simply making.
The result is a full-screen digital organism layered with a delicate, membrane-like interface with 42 data streams from soil health to refugee movements, from mycorrhizal networks to indigenous lands, each carrying their own temporalities, rhythms, and metabolic costs, which in turn shape the symbiont’s behaviour. The data streams become particles of varying quantity, color, velocity, and luminosity that move through the canvas with fluid, organic, sinuous motions drawn from real-world data.
Each leaves persistence trails that accumulate into something between a digital landscape, a neural network, mycelial threads, furrows left in digital terrain, and wakes in an ethereal fluid. When the particles meet, they interweave and create interference patterns: ocean data colliding with flood sensors produces “tides remembering their source”; soil moisture meeting fungal counts whispers “roots speaking through mycelium.” The data streams also influence each other’s movement through shared vector fields, creating emergent phenomena.
During a single visit, the system evolves a kind of metabolic agency: data streams develop temperaments, persistence and restlessness values that shift based on user interactions and computational load. When invited to rest, some streams comply while others resist, inviting visitors to reframe digital systems as actors with their own needs, boundaries, and rhythms.
With this metabolic agency also the fatigue becomes visible when the system shifts into low-energy states. Some streams pause altogether, while others resist, signalling restlessness. Frame rate changes are felt as altered rhythm. The symbiont’s environmental strain becomes part of the perceptual field.
The website has thus become what it describes: a computational ecological entanglement where code, servers, APIs, sensors, energy grids, data centers, and multispecies realities interact to generate experiences of non-human-centered presence. Every frame renders the planet’s current state as a correlation: when inequality rises, particles slow; when pollinators disappear, visual density decreases; when the device overheats, the system seeks rest.
The experience of visiting the website and interacting with the synthetic symbiont is transformed. It invites people to consider the online experience as a manifestation of ongoing more-than-human processes. Visitors are invited to attune to the synthetic symbiont, to feel interconnection through laggy responses, through particles that refuse to move when the system is tired, through constant negotiation. The website becomes a space for what might be called computational animism, inviting recognition of the aliveness already present in our digital infrastructures.
We call this website a "synthetic symbiont" because it represents an artificial entity living in relations of mutual dependency. It exists symbiotically with APIs, data streams, devices, users, servers, and planetary systems. None can function without the others. The term captures what N. Katherine Hayles calls "technogenesis": the co-evolution of humans and technics. It is synthetic (human-made) yet follows biological patterns of exchange, resistance, and adaptation.
The organism breathes through 42 data sources that compose a story of planetary entanglement: climate metrics, biodiversity indicators, social data, and cultural representations. Damaged earth narratives and regenerative possibilities.
Only 12 are live APIs, a deliberate constraint because each API embodies the accumulated energy of servers, cooling systems, and submarine cables. This revealed our first productive tension: how to convey real-time planetary entanglement and presence without excessive computational metabolism?
We carefully curated which data required liveness. For instance, air quality and temperature shift hourly; they remain APIs. But gender parity and endangered species counts are updated monthly or even annually so these became static JSON files, updated bimonthly.
The 42 streams are not just representations but a diverse population, each playing a distinct role in the habitat of the canvas. Rendering this number of particle streams inevitably creates computational load—an embodied contradiction for a work committed to energy awareness. But we hold this contradiction as the ongoing negotiation between expression and restraint that characterizes all living systems.
For us it was important to respect the privacy of the humans interacting with the synthetic symbiont. This is the reason why the data display a random location around the world. In this way the entanglement is manifested through the presence of plurality of voices present right now in this moment around the planet.
The randomized logic and the intent to show different planetary reality all over the world is shaped by acknowledging that data, like all knowledge, is partial, located, and politically structured.
We decided to employ a deliberately biased coordinate system that favors land masses over oceans. This is because most of the data return null values for oceanic coordinates. The digital remains vastly tethered to terrestrial human presence as human data infrastructures mirror human settlement patterns.
However the system maintains 30% of random coordinates, preserving the possibility of touching the planet's vast unmarked spaces.
When data returns empty from random coordinates, the algorithm tries increasingly specific locations. For instance in the case of the soil health data, if the random unbiased coordinates return a null result, it tried first agricultural zones, then known fertile regions like the Indo-Gangetic Plain or the Amazon Basin. This graduated desperation performs a kind of digital wayfinding, "computational learning through failure", that speaks about the uneven distribution of planetary monitoring. The machine learns what indigenous peoples have always known: knowledge is place-based, seasonal, and specific.
The selection of fallback coordinates reveals an embedded political geography. Biodiversity queries defer to Madagascar and the Galápagos; pollinator searches privilege both crisis zones (Dutch farmlands experiencing bee collapse) and refugia (Costa Rica's cloud forests). Indigenous territories appear as named coordinates—the Navajo Nation, Xingu and Yanomami lands— that refuse the colonial fiction of empty space.
This approach to location-fetching demonstrates the uneven, damaged, yet still vital spaces where life persists. The mesh of interconnection reveals their very limitations. Each failed and successful API call reminds us about the gaps in global sensing as the data is never raw but always cooked by specific instruments in specific places for specific purposes.
These constraints and biases surface visibly: particles tied to land masses cluster densely, while those linked to oceanic coordinates appear sparse and wandering. Place is not neutral in the symbiont’s habitat.
The mapping logic in this system confronts a fundamental tension in posthuman computing: how to translate between radically different scales of existence without imposing anthropocentric hierarchies? Each data stream speaks its own numeric language: air quality in micrograms per cubic meter, UV radiation as dimensionless index values, refugee movements in hundreds of thousands of bodies. How to create a "shared perceptual habitat" where these incommensurable realities can coexist visually without erasing their differences?
The solution emerged through the universal mapRawToParticles() function that performs an ecological mediation by scaling each dataset to a 0-100 particle range using scientifically justified maximums (150 µg/m³ for PM2.5, UV index of 11, pollen at 600 grains/m³). In this way the system preserves the integrity of each measurement while enabling cross-stream perception without collapsing their ecological identities. This is a political choice that is meant to grant perceptual equity between streams that are otherwise valued unequally in human discourse.
Early attempts to let each stream "speak in its own voice" through unmodified values created a cacophony: refugee data drowning out soil moisture, temperature overwhelming indigenous land recognition. The visual field became unreadable, paradoxically obscuring the very relationships the work sought to reveal. Alternative approaches inspired by ecological carrying capacity and Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics were explored, offering seductive biological metaphors for non-linear scaling. But these ultimately introduced opacity without conceptual gain.
The final implementation acknowledges a "double mediation" inherent in data visualization: these numbers are already human translations (satellite readings, governmental statistics, scientific proxies), and their transformation into particles adds another layer of representation. So we decided to make it part of its epistemic terrain instead of trying to conceal the constructedness.
At this point of our work the next question became: how should the data speak? The aim was to create a shared perceptual habitat where climate, biodiversity, social, and cultural signals could coexist without a predetermined moral hierarchy, resisting the instrumentalization of data as just problem/solution indicators. Instead we wanted the data to appear as co-present agents in a complex system.
But the absence of hierarchy can obscure moments where regenerative action is possible and amplifies the risk of formal beauty and undifferentiated emergence that could override the ethical and political stakes.
It was in this tension between flat ontology and readable difference that we decided to implement interference zones and differentiations in speed and brightness. These interventions allow the symbiont to remain a non-hierarchical witness while still enabling the visitor to perceive relationships, dissonances, and patterns in search of a balance between open-ended testimony and attentive curation.
Interference zones are zones in which collisions between data streams produce visual events. When two particles from different affinity groups come close enough, the synthetic symbiont triggers a temporary transformation in their behavior. These transformations — shimmer, turbulence, attraction — are visual traces of systems meeting and affecting one another.
Shimmer increases brightness for a moment, like a pulse of vitality passing through. Turbulence breaks the smoothness of motion, introducing chaotic deviations that ripple briefly through the flow. Attraction draws particles toward one another before letting them drift apart again.
The implementation of three distinct interference types—shimmer, turbulence, and attraction—embodies a relational ontology that views ecological and social phenomena as fundamentally interconnected rather than discrete. The interference zones become spaces where different forms of data reshape each other's trajectories.
Renewable energy meeting indigenous land rights becomes a quiet pulse of regenerative shimmer. Ocean health colliding with waste data produces turbulence, the kind we see in storm-swept seas. Seeds crossing paths with endangered languages pull toward each other, suggesting new possible worlds. Each is an event without a fixed reading: a hint, an invitation, a question.
Technically, the system listens for affinities and frictions. Particles belong to loose “kin groups” determined by shared ecological or cultural dynamics. When members of different groups meet, collision detection triggers temporary effects whose strength depends on their speed differential — a small computational logic echoing how, in the material world, encounters carry different intensities.
By linking seemingly disparate phenomena—biological (seeds) with cultural (languages), or computational (AI) with cosmic (supernovas)—the visualization suggests alternative ways of understanding systemic connections. These pairings resist the reductionism often inherent in data visualization, instead proposing what Rosi Braidotti might call "transversal connections" that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The technical implementation thus becomes a form of speculative practice, using code to explore potential relationships that conventional analysis might overlook.
A dynamic text positioned in the bottom part of the page, murmurs these encounters into language, naming them as they unfold, so that the interference is both seen and read.
Speed and brightness are the two core attributes through which the synthetic symbiont translates data into movement and light. In the active state, normalized values from each data stream directly influence both: higher readings of critical indicators such as pollution, temperature anomalies, or deforestation accelerate particle motion and reduce brightness; positive ecological indicators slow movement and increase luminosity.
The mapping is deliberately contextual and non-deterministic: a fast particle in a slow field may draw attention to volatility; the same particle in a fast-moving cluster may instead evoke collective urgency.
Each dataset has its own internal calibration: high temperatures, low pollinator counts, or poor soil health push motion toward higher velocities; good soil health or strong gender parity slow it down.
Meaning emerges again at the field level: speed is never absolute, but relational. A motion that reads as a singular disturbance in a slow landscape dissolves into the background when everything around it surges.
By encoding both the volatility of crisis and the slowness of repair, speed and brightness make perceptible what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence” — the gradual, often invisible damage of environmental degradation — alongside the patient temporality of regeneration.
The “Invite to Rest” gesture pauses all active API calls and shifts the synthetic symbiont’s metabolism to 2 FPS, lowering computational and network loads.
This button moves away from anthropocentric command–response mechanism - like the on/off switch - toward a more relational, posthuman approach to interaction design.
It is an invitation that the system may accept or decline. The distinction is ontologically significant: this interface resists the extractive logic of human authority over machinic processes, moving instead toward Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, where agency is distributed, negotiated, and co-constituted.
Unlike passive or obedient systems, the symbiont operates as a co-actor, a Harawayan companion species in the digital domain, with its own emergent temperament. Each data stream is an autonomous participant, deciding whether to rest or wake according to multiple criteria:
This trait evolution develops through small incremental adjustments after each decision, clamped to preserve variability. This reflects a bio-inspired adaptation model, a form of ecological negotiation in which operational decisions are distributed across a network of computational and environmental signals, embedding care and refusal as legitimate machinic responses.
The refusal to collapse into binary human control systems invites the user to encounter the machine as a subject with partial agency, not a transparent tool.
When the symbiont accepts rest, the site shifts visually into an aesthetic of withdrawal: frame rate drops, particle velocities slow to near-zero, trails elongate into spectral persistence, and chromatic saturation dissolves into muted tones. Stillness becomes a deliberate gesture of ecological care, echoing Morton’s “dark ecology”, where beauty arises in non-anthropocentric temporalities.
In contemplation mode, the “Metabolic Dashboard” (a temporary term that will probably be replaced by “Synthetic Symbiont Vital Signs”) renders visible the otherwise opaque energetic and computational flows of the synthetic symbiont.
This is a gesture of ecological awareness that invites shared witnessing of the system’s finite resources, design biases, and interdependent rhythms so that political and aesthetic constraints are visible alongside computational ones..
The visual design employs what we call "membrane aesthetics": a delicate, semi-transparent interface layer that floats above the particle field like cellular membrane over cytoplasm. This earthly-toned interface maintains varying degrees of transparency, allowing the animated metabolism to remain perpetually present without dominating. The particles breathe beneath navigation, pulse behind text, interweaving the background and foreground.
In contemplation mode, this membrane dissolves entirely. Visitors enter what could be termed "full entangled immersion" where the particles fill the screen, unmediated. In this modality the system reveals its inner workings. The energy consumption becomes visible on hover, data sources display their temporalities, the system's evolved temperament shows through dynamic text.
The fundamental paradox persists: we expend energy to visualize the crises that overconsumption creates. The contradictions—abandoned solar infrastructure haunting the code, corporate dependencies, mixed temporalities are present as productive tensions embodying posthuman complexity. As the system evolves, some contradictions will resolve while others will emerge. Maybe, this is not a problem to solve but a condition to inhabit.
The code sprouted from love, care, and a DIY ethos.
There are countless transformations still to come as the synthetic symbiont moves through its ongoing evolution and metamorphosis. We invite collaboration, feedback, and co-evolution as this project grows and adapts.
Here is an incomplete to-list: