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 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.
This synthetic symbiont continues to evolve and metamorphose.
The code was born from love, care, and a DIY ethos—there are countless transformations still to undergo. We invite collaboration, feedback, and co-evolution as this project grows and adapts.
We invite you to read the complete report on how the website works here.