Through the windows

The homepage of this site has no pages in the usual sense, only a path for a camera. The first screen is St Michael from Dürer’s Apocalypse. Scroll, and the camera dives into a round window torn in the print; behind it is the next picture, with the works hanging on it. Every chapter after that is entered through a window: an arch, a lancet, a quatrefoil, a row of stone arches, and finally a wall with five lancets.

The path was found round by round. The earliest drafts were radial, a spiral staircase, an endless canvas; I chose the plainest, with the prints behind the page and a crystal ball as a magnifier. But scrolling it still felt like one long web page. Then came three ways of choreographing the scroll: a camera walking through one picture, pages turning like a book, and a woodcut cut into layers with the camera flying through the holes. What stayed was the camera work of the first and the windows of the third.

Once the direction was set, the hard part was pacing. In the first version a light flick of the wheel overshot everything, and the windows went by so fast you couldn’t read the chapter names. Now the scroll isn’t even: around each stop the scroll distance stretches in a smooth bump, so the camera slows, rests, and speeds away again. Passing through a window is a stop too; the window’s name holds still while the camera goes through, and drifts off only once you’ve had time to read it.

Other changes were forced by problems. In a few places the camera skimmed the edge of the picture in front, and the hard edge stood across the view like a plank, so the edges of the big pictures deep in the scene now fade out unevenly. Coming close to a statue, the camera used to end up inside it; now the statue fades before the camera touches it. Going through a window, the camera used to slide sideways while moving forward, so the wall swept across the view; now it lines up with the window from far back and goes straight in. On its own, each change is tiny.

I made this site with several AI coding agents. I decided the structure and every round’s choices; they wrote most of the code; I reviewed it, found fault and sent it back. The prints are by Dürer and Doré, both in the public domain. The statue scans come from Cosmo Wenman (the Winged Victory), the SMK Royal Cast Collection in Copenhagen (the Pensieroso and Demosthenes) and noe-3d.at (the grave angel); the credits are in the footer.