It’s the year of shedding skin and healing. The snake, wise ouroboros done dirty since creation. When you draw Death in a tarot spread and say “it’s actually a card about transformation,” well, guess what, shedding skin hurts. Meanwhile, the ladder: Unlucky underside, reviled corporate trajectory, boomer “pull it up” trick, mechanical and bureaucratic tool for progress without imagination. Yeah, it’s the year of the ladder.

The original game of snakes and ladders (Moksha Patam in ancient India) was designed with a spiritual purpose, the movement of players representing their ascending journey via virtues, or unplanned descent via vice. The western adaptation gradually forgot its karmic lessons and became an activity of luck. The American version went further, turned sin-tempting snakes into "chutes". The game’s visual format is a section through a tall building, starting on the ground and reaching enlightenment on the rooftop. While described literally in the original board design, the only hint in the modern version that this is an architectural representation of 3D space (i.e. a section) is the presence of the ladder.

Architectural drawings are translations of a spatially normal yet unrealised world from a completely hypothetical viewpoint. Their symbols and language layer up, representing space and structure, decoration and mechanics. A thought experiment. In a floor plan, each particle in the field can be represented as pixel (solid) and no pixel (space), a binary utterly suited to map-movement and algorithm. A sectional elevation drawing, on the other hand, offers a different understanding of space, foregrounding the interior of each room as a planar backdrop to its inhabitants. More domestic and more intimate than the abstracted eye-view of a plan.

Year of the Ladder is a generative, interactive, responsive code artwork. It is ornamental, tactile, a bit textile, inspired by both architectural drawing and tapestry, and built with a variegated 5-square module as the base digital material.

It is a stack of 48 rooms forming the decorative interior backdrop to the fool’s journey eight storeys up to enlightenment. Movement is directed by the rules of snakes, ladders and dice, however these guides are hidden and we see only traces of their consequences rippling through the board. Just one output reveals the mechanics; this is the ‘back of the cloth’, the structural CAD drawing, and homage to the game’s Nintendo descendent (Donkey Kong).

As well as the rare ‘back of the cloth’ there are five other material traits (Paper, Blueprint, Screen, Two-bit Color, Two-bit B&W). Each output begins with an initial color seed (hue 1-360), from which a full color palette is generated, based on low or high chance of deviation. The game board grid is composed of panels with low or high levels of ornamentation.

The project continues three connected ideas explored in my previous generative projects: Sequence and story in generative art, architectural drawing syntax and imagination, and the responsive screen. The digital canvas (the phone, the window) is a tactile part of the work engaged through touch and resize. Digital art should be made for the computer we hold in our hands while walking and sleeping. But I’ve designed this to expand into a tiled / textiled triptych setting on desktop too.

Less literal than Interiors, more refined than Unicurse, joining these as a trio of projects exploring many connected rooms and tracing our labyrinthine journey through them.