The Voyager

Time is not invisible, it is a relentless accumulation of white dust, falling like sand from a broken hourglass and slowly filling the void of the universe. The Voyager is an organic, ethereal creature that consumes time: it drifts through the current, swallowing the white particles like a black hole. The sound represents human civilization--our attempts to communicate, to declare that we are here. The Voyager responds to these signals, yet it never stops feeding. Against deep time, human struggle becomes only a tiny ripple, brief and fragile. The Voyager is an interactive project created to deliver a message to future humanity: in the endless river of time, human beings are unimaginably small.

The project originally began with an idea that was quite different from what it has become: a reimagining of what the Golden Voyager Record might include in the future. I wanted users to be able to engrave their own records by recording their voices or even capturing gestures and movements as a form of inscription. At the same time, the work invites reflection: if something we leave behind were to be received by an extraterrestrial intelligence, what kind of message could truly represent humanity and what would we choose to send?

The video recordings below document an early, highly sketched version of the concept. At the time, I was inspired by an irisgram program, so I experimented with adding visualizations that would make the interface feel more like a vinyl record player.

Influenced by the visual language of The Matrix, its cold green glow, cascading code, and the sense of an unseen system operating behind reality, my first direction for the creature was a matrix-like artificial intelligence. In this version, the creature would not simply hear sound, but compute it, treating human voices and signals as input streams to be decoded, classified, and absorbed.

Another idea was to design a virtual creature. While watching Oscilloscope Music visualizations, I became fascinated by oscillating wave patterns—when I imagined translating those patterns into 3D, the way they sink and fold inward felt almost like a mouth opening and closing. At the same time, the silhouette also reminded me of a jellyfish, which led to the creature’s final form: soft, flowing, and semi-organic, yet clearly generated by signal-like structures.

In the interaction, its “mouth” continuously absorbs small white particles. As the particles approach the mouth, they gradually slow down, as if being pulled into a stronger and stronger gravitational field. On the sound-interaction layer, the creature responds to the microphone input: based on the FFT analysis, it briefly shifts its color and the amplitude of its movement, rising and falling more intensely for a moment, before inevitably returning to its original state. This return is intentional: it represents the creature’s unstoppable feeding, and the user’s powerlessness in the face of it, echoing the idea that human effort is only a temporary disturbance against something vastly larger and indifferent.

boxes[i][j] is a 2D array of Box objects.

Each Box object knows its own (x, y) position, its wave phase angle, and its current height z.

Each Box also stores freqLevel and the current color it should use (currentHue).