nightmare

A young man experiences a recurring dream about a labyrinth in such high detail that he is able to draw a detailed map of it. Rendered as a 3D world in WebGL and best experienced in Google Chrome, 'R' explores the story of the dream - both past and present - through a series of on-screen narratives, puzzles and text-sculptures. A regularly written short story also accompanies the work.

A schoolgirl who has narrowly escaped death hides and reflects beneath a roadway tunnel. Her scattered thoughts manifest against the grotty concrete walls before fading away again into nothing. Soon she realises she's been hiding herself away for days. How the hell did she end up here in the first place? Contains strong language and references to violence.

A mouse-responsive exploration of the final nightmarish dream of a blind old man. Contains a transient narrative and basic interactive problem solving puzzles. Created using a combination of photography and 3D animated renders.

Inspired by the author’s own dreams and experiences, The Flat presents users/readers with a challenging mouse-controlled environment in which narrative fragments left behind by an abandoned building’s previous inhabitants still linger. Through a combination of atmospheric photography, parallax scrolling techniques, snippets of written fiction, and an evocative soundtrack, the work allows various rooms in the flat to be explored by panning around with the mouse; the transient textual narratives themselves often changing and/or progressing when the rooms are revisited. To add to the feeling of tension and urgency, and to encourage the work to be revisited, a timer ticks down in the top right hand corner of the screen before the user/reader is ejected from the narrative and shown a final, enigmatic scene: a white hooded figure in the back garden.

 Dim O’Gauble follows the glimpsing story of an elderly woman reflecting on her grandson’s nightmarish – possibly paranormal – visions of the future. Told through a densely textured, mouse-responsive graphical environment, the work presents the user/reader with a series of transient texts, some of which change/mutate or float/disappear over time, intending to reflect the very nature of the hazy/difficult memories being uncovered. Progression through Dim O’Gauble is achieved by clicking on the various arrows visible in the graphical backgrounds, which quickly shift the viewport around the ‘canvas’ of the piece. In addition, various sub-sections of the narrative can be discovered by clicking on hotspots in the text. The final scene reveals a video sequence of a tunnel/subway with text super-imposed at different sizes over the top of it. The sketches/drawings used in the work were created by the author when he was 8 years old.