Into the Maelstrom
Sonny Yan
Advisor: Kari Love
Into the Maelstrom is an interactive web-based experience that explores the cyclical nature of anxiety, where attempts to regain control deepen feelings of helplessness. By manipulating the browser mechanism, the project blurs the line between choice and coercion, revealing the disturbing paradox of seeking control in the midst of chaos.
Project Description
Into the Maelstrom is an interactive web experience that explores the cyclical and consuming nature of anxiety. It immerses users in a digital nightmare where attempts to control the environment only deepen the sense of helplessness. By manipulating browser mechanics and subverting user expectations, the project reflects the unsettling paradox of anxiety: the harder one struggles to regain control, the more chaotic and inescapable the situation becomes.
Participants navigate a distorted digital space that reacts antagonistically to their behavior, which blurs the line between choice and coercion. This experience emphasizes the illusion of control, and demonstrates how coping mechanisms can inadvertently reinforce the very fears they seek to alleviate. Through recursive interaction, users confront the discomfort of uncertainty and the pitfalls of false autonomy.
Into the Maelstrom challenges the perception of control in digital and psychological contexts. It transforms a familiar interface into a medium of confinement, urging users to question the reliability of their decisions. The project raises questions about whether control is actually achievable - in other words, whether the struggle itself breeds chaos.
Technical Details
- HTML: Page structure and content organization
- CSS: Styling, layout, and responsive design
- JavaScript: Core programming logic and functionality
- p5.js: Creative coding library for visual elements and animations
- Web APIs: DOM API for element manipulation; Window API for popup interactions (“window.open()”, “window.close()”); Event Listeners for user interaction handling
Research/Context
Into the Maelstrom interrogates the psychological architecture of anxiety through a synthesis of dream theory, interactive art, and digital systems. Drawing on Jungian archetypes and Freudian psychoanalysis, the project frames dreams as symbolic landscapes where repressed fears surface as fragmented narratives—a concept mirrored in its recursive interfaces and surreal visuals. Contemporary research by Alice Robb and Patrick McNamara, which positions nightmares as unresolved emotional feedback loops, directly informs the experience’s escalating chaos, while Matthew Walker’s studies on sleep’s role in emotional regulation ground its critique of anxiety’s corrosive effect on mental clarity.
Artistically, this project bridges Joseph Cornell’s symbolic assemblages and Moncage’s disorienting dreamscapes, using mundane objects juxtaposed with uncanny distortions to evoke the dissonance of anxious thought. Christopher Nolan’s Inception and The Little Prince’s poetic allegories inspire its recursive structure, where attempts to “escape” only deepen entrapment—a metaphor for the futility of controlling intangible fears. Interactive precedents like The Wilderness Downtown and Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon demonstrate how browser mechanics can subvert user agency, a technique leveraged here to transform clicks and closures into self-defeating rituals.
Technically, JavaScript simulates the Sisyphean struggle of anxiety: particles gravitate toward illusory control (the cursor), while scripted pop-ups defy closure, echoing algorithmic systems that weaponize engagement. The invasive .txt file finale, inspired by Mina Amiri Kalvøy’s blurring of digital/physical self-reflection, critiques the illusion of autonomy in coded spaces. By merging psychoanalytic theory with glitch aesthetics, Into the Maelstrom positions the browser as a panopticon—a digital subconscious where choice and coercion collide.