clemens.listsof30.com is my personal page, and it has two sides: the Author who writes lists of 30, and the Engineer who builds tools. This is the same page as a room you walk into. It lives inside the 3D Walkthrough: a second gate beside the rotunda’s home arch, next to the one into the planetarium, leads to a round room with me on a pedestal in the middle.
The two sides
The room opens on the Author side, in the gallery’s own paper colours. I’m standing on the pedestal in a hat, a white tee, dark trousers and brown shoes. Round the wall hang eight plaques from the Author half of my page: the 400+ lists, a year-end review every year since 2008, the books, Clem’s Travels. Across from the gate, the headline reads “I love lists of 30.”
Click the statue and it turns round once while the room goes dark. Halfway through the turn, at the moment my back is to you, the clothes change. I come round in a red and gold armour suit with gold shoulders, steel bands across the stomach and a glowing triangle reactor in the chest. The room is now the Engineer side, in ink. Nine engineering plaques replace the writing ones: Clembot, the games, the recipe app, the job search tool. The headline reads “I build tools I actually use.” Click again and I turn back into the hat.
The head is the same in both. It’s built from my photo: a shaved head, round tortoiseshell glasses, a mustache with a small tuft under the lip, and a smile.
How it’s built
The statue is built from three.js primitives: spheres, capsules, cylinders and a few boxes, smooth-shaded, with no model file to download. Each part carries an ink outline, a slightly larger copy of itself drawn inside out in one flat colour, so the statue still reads as drawn like the rest of the gallery. The outline is dark on the Author side and turns light on the Engineer side, or it would vanish against the dark room. The suit’s plates have a little metallic sheen and the reactor glows in both rooms.
Both outfits are built once and share the head. The room already ran a single number from 0 (Author) to 1 (Engineer) through the turn, swapping the plaques when it crosses a half. The clothes swap on the same line of code, so the outfit, the plaques and the turn can never get out of step. Under reduced motion there’s no turn: the room and the outfit change at once.
The plaques are a snapshot, not a live feed. A script reads my personal page’s own content file and writes the two personas, every stat and piece of work, into the site. The build never reaches into another project’s folder. The headline is a flat banner hung on a round wall, so it hangs in by the depth of the curve, or the wall would swallow both of its ends.
The screenshots
Under software rendering, one screenshot takes about a second, and the whole turn takes 0.9 seconds. So the turn above was captured on the live site with the page’s clock stopped, then stepped forward a fraction of a second between frames.