The concept: a museum, not a dive
AI Karamba is a real studio in Tel Aviv making AI animation, images and music, with the tagline "Ready. Set. ANIMATE" and a healthy disrespect for hype. A portfolio grid felt too polite. So the studio's output became a natural-history museum for unnatural art: three wings, nine specimens, one chandelier, marine snow, and a gift shop that is actually the contact section.
A sibling site in this experiment (Abyss Scroll) already owned "scroll = descending dive", so the spatial metaphor here is deliberately different: you wander a hall. Sections are rooms. The "You are here" floor plan is a real map of the page.
The creature engine (js/museum.js, ~1,300 lines)
One base class, nine species. Each creature lives on its own canvas "tank", driven by a shared controller that only animates tanks currently on screen.
class Creature {
// mt = motion time (freezes under prefers-reduced-motion)
// gt = glow time (always breathes — even a still museum glows)
// spring physics for startle darts + gentle attraction to the cursor
}
Three ideas do most of the work:
1. Two clocks. Motion time and glow time are separate. Under prefers-reduced-motion the swimming freezes but the bioluminescent breathing continues, so the museum stays alive without moving.
2. One glow primitive. A single glow() helper draws radial-gradient light. Every creature is composed almost entirely from stacked glows plus line-art anatomy: wing ribs on the ray, tentacle curves on the jellies, halftone dots for the vintage-poster wings.
3. Startle springs. Click or tap near a specimen and a spring impulse sends it darting, then eases it home. The same spring gently leans creatures toward your cursor, which is why the hall feels aware of you.
The specimen registry
| Cat. No. | Specimen | Wing | What it represents |
|---|---|---|---|
| KD-01 | Reel Eel | I · Motion Hall | The commercial animation reels: a film-strip eel swimming in loops |
| KD-02 | The Projectionist | I · Motion Hall | Storytelling sequences: casts a light-cone like a projector |
| KD-03 | The Sunbather (after Herzl) | II · Still Gallery | The real "Theodor Herzl relaxing on beach" image from the studio's AI gallery |
| KD-04 | Cosmonaut Medusa | II · Still Gallery | The astronaut series: a jellyfish in a glass helmet |
| KD-05 | The Poster Ray | II · Still Gallery | Vintage-poster works: a diamond-kite ray with halftone-print wings |
| KD-06 | Not My Circus | III · Sound Vault | Real track title — a jelly in a striped circus tent bell |
| KD-07 | We Love Hippies | III · Sound Vault | Real track title — a tie-dye octopus |
| KD-08 | Digital Decay | III · Sound Vault | Real track title — a fish dissolving into glitch blocks |
| KD-09 | The Algorithm Ate My Soul | III · Sound Vault | Real track title — need we explain |
Plus the lobby's Chandelier Jelly (the museum's light fixture) and ambient marine snow drifting through every room.
Type & palette
Museum wall-text serif meets specimen-label mono: Fraunces for headlines (a museum voice with old-style warmth), Space Grotesk for interface, IBM Plex Mono for catalog numbers and plaques. All vendored locally as woff2, nothing loaded from a CDN.
Each wing leans on its own glow accents against near-black #020609, so walking the page feels like moving between differently-lit rooms.
What is real (integrity plaque)
Grounded in a live scan of ai-karamba.com: the tagline, the voice line about art in the AI age, the three galleries (VIDS / PICS / SOUNDS), the named image subjects, all four track titles, the socials (TikTok, Midjourney, Suno) and the WhatsApp contact. Nothing else was invented: no clients, no metrics, no awards.
And a rule this whole experiment follows: no third-party embeds. Every exhibit is procedural art that links out to the real thing instead of iframing it. Your visit stays private; the fish stay mathematical.
How it was made (the honest part)
This site is one of a dozen in an experiment: Claude agents building radically different sites in parallel, each with its own "eyes" — a headless-Chrome script that screenshots desktop, scroll and mobile after every change and reports console errors. Nothing ships until the report reads CLEAN and the screenshots survive an art-director review.