Interactive · three languages
My life as a game
A hand drawn scroll film of one year in the life of a single tree, with a museum buried under its roots, Istanbul on one side and Munich on the other, and thirteen objects laid along the taproot in the order they happened. There are no images and no video in it. Everything, including the notebook that explains it, is drawn line by line while you watch.
What it is
Scrolling down runs a year: summer, the turn, the fall, dusk, and then the camera goes underground to the roots and the doors. The film is scrubbed rather than played. Every leaf's flight is calculated from your scroll position, so scrolling back up runs it exactly in reverse and the leaves return to their branches.
Nothing in it depends on the clock except a light idle sway, which is the reason it can be run backwards at all.
The world
The cover is not the whole map. Scroll up and the sky opens: clouds, a hot air balloon towing a banner, birds circling a thermal, and at night the stars. Drag sideways and the camera pans off the meadow. West lies Istanbul, with the Bosphorus, Kız Kulesi, a working ferry and the Beyazıt gate. East lies Munich, with the Alps, the Frauenkirche, the Eisbach and its surfer, a beer garden, the U Bahn and TUM.
Underground there is more than roots: a cellar, a well whose rope reaches the water table, an ant colony with branching galleries, a mole, a sleeping rabbit, a buried amphora, an aquifer with a blind fish in it, and a museum of thirteen objects in three bands, the deepest being the earliest.
Six ways in
Six things in the world are doors as well as scenery. The wooden sign on the pier in Istanbul, the U Bahn stairs in Munich, the banner behind the balloon, the door of the house, a workbench with a saw leaning on it, and a game table with the stones of a game nobody finished still on the board.
How it is built
One HTML file for the film. No framework, no images, no video, no tracking. The tree, the roots and the grass are grown by a seeded random walk, so the same tree comes back every time.
It ships through a seventeen gate release audit that blocks publication on a credential pattern, a personal data value, an untranslated key, a dictionary that is not symmetric across all three languages, or a number on the cover that no longer matches what the site actually holds.
Where it lives
It plays here, and it also runs on its own, in English, Turkish and German. The notebook at the bottom of the film explains every hidden thing in it. Nothing in there is a riddle: if something is listed, it happens.