For U
#001A six-stage first-person experience about the emptiness algorithmic feeds leave behind — built so the participant recognises themselves as both victim and accomplice.
- Année
- 2026-ongoing
- date
- 2026.07 – Present
- dimension
- 1920×1080
- media
- Unity / C# / MCP-assisted development
- role
- Solo concept-to-production designer & technical artist
A — PREMISE
Short-video feeds run on borrowed pleasure. The reward lands inside a stimulus–response loop measured in seconds; the debt is repaid, with interest, as emptiness the moment you stop. Byung-Chul Han names the cost as the erosion of deep attention; Anna Lembke describes the same drift neurologically, as a pleasure–pain balance that keeps sliding toward pain.
Most anti-addiction messaging casts the user as an innocent victim. This work does not. The mechanism functions precisely because you feed it — voluntarily, swipe by swipe. The experience is built to bring you to a Sartrean position: I could have not scrolled. Victim and accomplice at once.
It deliberately avoids the high-arousal vocabulary of horror. The language is evacuation — desaturated colour, decaying feedback, muffled sound — across six stages.
B — THE SIX STAGES
Stage Metaphor Mechanic
01Primal desire The origin of primal pleasure A first-person hand reaches for a banana — immediate, frictionless grasp and release. The first voluntary reach toward a stimulus.
02Blind faith Nietzsche’s death of God — the passive erosion of spiritual foundations In a prayer scene, the sacred object at the centre of devotion deforms and melts through a Dalí-like vertex deformation.
03Sisyphus loop Nietzschean eternal recurrence, Camusian absurdity A stone pushed along a closed path. Withdrawal from interaction is designed as one of the ways out of the loop.
04Burnout society Han’s self-exploitation and excessive positivity Mechanised keystrokes pile up office text. Under self-imposed pressure the participant accelerates until the environment physically collapses.
05Algorithmic feed Han’s hyperattention — deep attention eroded by information overload A corridor. As the addiction parameter climbs, wall imagery distorts and colour drains toward monochrome; audio degrades into ambient noise, then cuts to silence at a narrative threshold.
06Data reckoning The awakening of Sartrean accomplice consciousness The system aggregates the participant’s authentic behavioural trace from the first five stages, normalises it, and hangs it in the scene as spatialised data.
C — DATA RECKONING
Stage 6 shows you the residue of your own behaviour. That only works if the data is real.
The first implementation — produced in an MCP-linked workflow between a language model and the Unity editor — looked visually complete and was populated by a random number generator entirely disconnected from the participant’s interaction history. Decorative placebo data. At the narrative climax of a work whose whole argument rests on confronting an authentic trace of yourself, fabricated numbers would have hollowed out the thesis.
I rejected that implementation and directed a redesign of the behavioural-data pipeline, so the visualisation reads, normalises and displays the participant’s actual interaction frequencies from the preceding stages.
The point generalises beyond this one fix: in human–AI co-creation the designer’s value lies not in accepting generated code, but in remaining the final arbiter of the work’s meaning-making logic and its ethical boundaries.