The Coral Garden

-A deep-sea microhabitat resonating with body rhythms

Live Site: https://coral-garden-murex.vercel.app/

Github: https://github.com/ystyao/coral-garden

Instead of a screen of demanding metrics, what if a month of sleep, heartbeats, and breaths became a place you could wander? The Coral Garden is a contemplative web installation that translates a continuous thirty-day archive of personal physiological data—captured via an Oura Ring—into a living, deep-sea microhabitat. It abandons the modern anxiety of fitness dashboards, daily streaks, and the relentless drive for bodily optimization. In a quiet act of digital rebellion, it returns our vital signs to organic forms. Every day of the body is translated into a cluster of seven coral species, accumulating into a submerged landscape that invites wandering, reading, and listening rather than mere tracking.

Corals grow slowly, intricately recording environmental conditions and traumas in their skeletons, making the reef a perfect metaphor for the human body as a living ledger. The installation maps seven numerical parameters—such as heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and deep sleep duration—into the volume, color, and physical behavior of specific coral species. Time is spatialized into a seabed river valley where the oldest days sit upstream. Much like biological life, past days are rendered as fixed histories; once a coral cluster is grown, it cannot be rewritten by subsequent remedial actions. Here, data ceases to be an optimization metric and becomes an immutable monument to the body's lived experience.

Borrowing the grammar of East Asian memorial culture, the project introduces data-driven daily rituals that explore the liminal space between machine logic and human emotion. A wayside Hokora shrine enshrines not a traditional deity, but the visitor's physiological state from the previous day. It draws an omikuji (fortune) wherein a generative language model weaves a classical Chinese poem reflecting the body's exhaustion or vitality—an algorithmic divination. At night, a drifting jellyfish lantern eschews medical terminology, translating the day's activity metrics into a tender deep-sea bedtime tale and sleep guide, completing the medium shift from quantitative analysis to digital healing.

The most critical interaction lies in the glass drifting bottles resting beside each daily coral cluster. Visitors are invited to seal a written reflection of their day inside the bottle. The system analyzes the emotional tone of these words and contrasts it against the hard physiological data that grew the surrounding coral. If a profound dissonance is detected—such as a diary entry radiating lightness while the biological data signals deep exhaustion—the bottle emits a distinct glow, permanently recording this misalignment. This mechanism highlights the central thesis of the installation: it observes the eternal inconsistency between human cognition and the physical vessel, a poetic dissonance that pure data visualization can never truly capture.

Course: CMAC740S Web-based Multimedia Communications