JOURNEY: from Looking to Seeing - INSTALLATION BLUEPRINT
The installation digital interactive blueprint created only for the purpose if this submission: https://journey.sentienttopaint.art/journeyofbecoming.html
A note on scope: this is a condensed overview, prepared for the Arte Laguna Prize. The full blueprint of the real installation — the complete room logic, interaction design, and technical detail — is a far more complex document, and it lives partially as the live interactive blueprint itself, at the link above. What is written here is the door; the blueprint is the house.
This work was originally designed as a digital journey based on artist's paintings, poetry and music https://journey.sentienttopaint.art.
How the experience would work in physical space:
Journey is walked alone. The visitor does not watch the work — the visitor is creating the work and a completely new way of comprehension based on given interaction. The whole passage can be walked today as a live blueprint, and its core interactions already run in the browser work itself — the paintings under moving hue light, filmed by the artist herself, for her Chromopsyche wheel.
The passage, room by room:
Overture — the eight paintings together. The visitor enters a single open space where all eight canvases are assembled together under slowly cycling hue lights. For one collective moment, every painting shifts character at once — one canvas becoming many paintings before the visitor's eyes. This is the thesis, shown, not told. Then the visitor is invited onward, alone.
Descent — three rooms. The trilogy Journey of Acceptance, one canvas per darkened room: Lethe & the Cosmic Man, Tyche & the Faithless, Ananke's Messenger. Light is low and directional; each room holds one painting, one projected line of text, and sound designed to be felt before it is heard — low-frequency tones carried through the floor rather than the air. The visitor's own phone becomes the instrument: opening the room's page, they listen for colour, choosing the hue under which each painting speaks to them. There is nothing to get right. The descent asks only that they stay.
Mirror — the Chromopsyche. At the turning point stands a single interactive station: a colour wheel, projected large or mounted as a touch surface. The visitor turns it and chooses — red is feeling, gold intuition, green sensation, blue thinking. It is a mirror. Not a measure. The choice is saved to their device only, and travels with them into the ascent.
Ascent — five rooms. The pentalogy Becoming One — Journey of Recognition, one goddess per room, in rising light: Theia, Aphrodite, Sophrosyne, Persephone, Euphrosyne — five thresholds of identity, desire, balance, choice, and joy. Each room pairs the canvas with its poem, written at the easel, given voice. Illumination responds to the visitor's presence: the further they walk in, the more the room reveals. By the fifth room, the light is full.
Witness Wall — the meeting. The passage ends where the aloneness ends. On a projection wall, the visitor is asked for one honest sentence — anonymous, written on their own device, editable until they choose to give it. Given sentences appear as light among the sentences of everyone who walked before them. The wall is the installation's living archive: a surface whose pigment is other people's honesty.
The reading. As a visitor leaves, receives a colour reading composed from every hue they chose across the eight paintings — generated on their device, downloadable, stored nowhere and transmitted to no one. They take the work with them. The room keeps nothing but the sentence they chose to leave.
HOW IT WORKS — PRACTICAL NOTES
The visitor's phone is the interface. No app, no headsets, no queue for hardware: a QR code at each room's threshold opens that room's page in any browser. The visitor's choices are kept in the phone's own memory, so the sequence and the final reading assemble themselves as they walk.
Lighting. Programmable hue lighting directed on the canvases; presence-responsive dimming in the ascent rooms via simple motion sensing. The paintings' metallic pigment does the rest — the colour shifts are physical, not digital.
Sound. My own music created from poems of those goddesses. Low-frequency transducers in the descent (felt, not heard); directional speakers for the poem-voices in the ascent, so each room holds only its own voice.
Witness Wall. One projector and the existing web layer. Sentences are moderated-by-design: the visitor edits and confirms before anything appears. Sharing is voluntary.
Privacy. Nothing is tracked, no personal details are ever asked. Colour choices live only on the visitor's device; the reading is generated there and deleted with the page. On a borrowed tablet, the reading waits under an anonymous number — eight hues and nothing else — and is deleted once collected. Only the freely given sentence remains.
Access — everyone is included. The light never strobes: every hue change is a slow breath, seconds long, safe for photosensitive visitors — signage at the entrance says so, and a steady-light passage exists on request. For deaf visitors the descent already speaks their language — sound felt through the floor, not heard — and each poem-voice exists as text and as vibration, carried in the palm by a small hand-held resonator. For those who cannot see, the passage gives more to feeling and hearing — the poems spoken, the sound felt, the rooms walked by tone and touch; in this work, seeing is an abstract word, interchangeable with feeling and hearing — it has never meant only the eyes.
The whole passage is step-free, everything reached and used from a seated height. Any need announced in advance is adjusted for in advance, and people are welcomed with open arms, in whatever condition they arrive. None of this is a special provision added at the door; it is the thesis itself — every way of sensing is a valid answer to the question the work asks. Nobody is left out. If a phone fails. No one is turned away. A visitor without a phone borrows a house tablet at the entrance and receives a number — an anonymous code, no personal details asked, ever. Their reading waits under that number and code, retrievable later on the site, then deleted. A crashed page is restored by scanning the room's code again — choices live in the device's memory — and the passage also works with no screen at all: the paintings, the light, and the sound carry it.Scale. The full form is nine spaces, but the structure is modular: descent, mirror, ascent, and wall can each stand alone, and the whole can be built as one room with nine stations. Duration: roughly 20–40 minutes, set by the visitor, not by the work. Someone to talk to. The passage is walked alone, but no one is ever left alone with it. A quiet companion is present through every hour the doors are open — unhurried, easy to find — to help with a device, to lend hands where hands are unable, to walk beside anyone who cannot walk it alone, or simply to be a person to talk to. What the rooms open, a human is there to hold. Support here is not an emergency measure; it is part of the work's hospitality. The browser work asks the question of one person at a screen. This installation asks it of one person in a room — and then, at the wall, of all of them together. We connect all. Do you see the same colour I see?
DECLARATION:
I, Simona Ray, declare the following about every work in this submission, because my work is about honest seeing - and that must include how my work itself is made.
All paintings are physical canvases, painted by my hand. The colour you see shifting across each of them is not a digital filter but video of the canvases under different colored lights: I mix metallic acrylic colours directly into the paint, so the surface answers to real light - the painting at dawn is not the painting at midnight. Every photograph of the canvases documents them as they physically are, captured under real conditions.
The poems were written by me, at the easel, in the same moment as the brushwork. They appear verbatim - on the site, in the songs, and beside the paintings. The music on the site and inside Journey began as those poems and as melodies that arrived while I painted. To turn them into finished recordings, I used an AI music application to assist in the music creation: I provided my poems for the lyrics word-for-word and mastered the songs based on my melodic and stylistic direction, to reflect what I felt and heard while at the easel. The voices in these recordings are AI-rendered; the words, the intention, and every decision of what exists and what was deleted are mine. I hold the commercial rights to these recordings, and I disclose their how they were made here in full. They are a reflection of me.
The website and browser work were conceived, designed, and creatively directed entirely by me. The code was built and implemented with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) as a software developer and technical advisor and fully based on my creative direction: every word, image, poem, sound, and structural idea is my own.
Beyond what is disclosed above, no third-party intellectual property has been incorporated into this submission, and no artificial intelligence was used in the creation of the paintings, the poems, videos, or the photographs.
I hand you my inner world - not because it is finished, but because it is honest and it is time to be shared!
Simona Ray · July 2026
