DBA ◇ A Night Cosmology
An artist-led research project
The LivingPattern
The body as an interface, rather than an object being measured.
Living Pattern investigates how moving image, sensory technology, bilateral experience, sound, light, rhythm, and embodied observation can create new ways of noticing and communicating human experience. Part artwork, part research environment, part evolving public tool.
Eden King · 2026 · Washington, D.C.
00How to read this project
Two registers,
kept apart on purpose.
This project draws on biology, neuroscience, astrology, mythology, ecology and autobiography. Those are not interchangeable ways of knowing, and the site does not present them as though they were. Colour carries the distinction throughout.
Green — the research register
What the project is, what has been built, what is being asked, and what is still unknown. Stated plainly, with the stage of development labelled. This is the register a funder, researcher or collaborator can hold the project to.
Crimson — the artistic register
The Living Pattern cosmology: a speculative framework written from inside a body. It is an artwork and a way of thinking, not a scientific claim, and it is marked as such wherever it appears.
02Questions
What is being
investigated.
The project proceeds by question rather than by conclusion. These are the ones currently open.
- What happens when the body becomes an interface rather than an object being measured?
- Can moving image help people recognise internal states that are difficult to describe verbally?
- Can bilateral sound, light, rhythm, and visual movement become materials for participatory artwork?
- How might technology support embodied literacy without turning subjective experience into diagnosis?
- What forms of knowledge become available when artistic, somatic, ecological and scientific ways of observing are allowed to sit beside one another without being collapsed into one another?
- How can an artist build technology around lived experience while protecting ambiguity, privacy, consent and human agency?
- Can an artwork function simultaneously as an experience, an archive, and a research instrument?
03Experiments
The work
so far.
Each entry is labelled with its actual stage. Nothing here is described as finished that is not.
-
Existing
Resonance · Breath
A free browser-based breath tool. No account, no data collection, no build step. Built to test whether an interface can offer a way in immediately rather than asking a person to navigate toward one. Live at resonancebreathe.netlify.app.
-
Existing
God's Armor — paintings
A painting series made between 2023 and 2026. The series is the visual source material the moving-image work is being built from.
-
In development
God's Armour — documentary
A feature-length experimental documentary, working title not final. Currently in source-gathering rather than storyboarding, built from a spoken account being reconstructed as a written source. Told through one perspective but not only about one person.
-
Existing
Short moving-image works
A set of short experimental pieces published openly, testing rhythm, repetition and bilateral movement as ways of carrying a state rather than describing one.
-
Existing
The eight folios
Eight pieces of written research and cosmology, articulated and now public. They sit in the artistic register and are marked accordingly.
-
Proposed
Installation environment
A room-scale version of the bilateral work using projection, spatial audio and light. Not built. This is the part of the project most in need of a host, a technical collaborator and production support.
04Technology
A family of
experimental interfaces.
Living Pattern is evolving into a set of interfaces for embodied experience. Some are built. Most are not. The labels below are honest about which is which, because the gap between them is what support at this stage would close.
-
Existing
Browser-based tools
Static single-file web builds with no framework, no build step, no third-party scripts, no analytics and no accounts. Accessibility and load speed are treated as part of the artwork, not as compliance.
-
Existing
Bilateral visual and auditory fields
Alternating left-right visual movement and sound, generated in the browser. Built and in use; the research question is what they do as artistic material rather than what they do clinically.
-
In development
Generative moving image
Image sequences that respond to rhythm and duration rather than to narrative, intended for both screen and projection.
-
In development
Self-reported experience mapping
Interfaces for describing an internal state without being scored, ranked or diagnosed. The design problem is holding ambiguity open instead of resolving it into a number.
-
Proposed
Projection, spatial audio, light
Room-scale work. Requires space, equipment and expertise the project does not currently have.
-
Proposed
Physical computing and environmental sensors
Sensing the room rather than the person where possible — light, sound, temperature, movement. Requires physical-computing mentorship.
-
Research question
Voluntary biometric input
If a person's own body data ever enters the work, can it be built so the data never leaves their device and they can destroy it at will? Unresolved, and nothing is being built until it is.
-
Research question
Archival interfaces
Can a single work be an experience, an archive and a research instrument at once without one of those roles quietly consuming the others?
05Field notes
The Living Pattern,
in eight parts.
The register changes here. What follows is the project's artistic cosmology: eight folios written from inside a body, kept in the voice they were written in.
They move between cell biology, nervous-system language, astrology, myth and autobiography. They are a way of thinking rather than a finding — nothing in them is offered as evidence, and nothing in the research register rests on them.
Each folio stays closed until you open it. If you are here for the research, skip the set and carry on to Public Interest.
1 in the 12 ◇ 12 in the 1
Artist's hypothesis · speculative framework · poetic model
One ◇ The opening
1 in the twelve, twelve in the 1
A theory of everything, written from the inside out. The water table beneath the soil. The framework underneath the work. The pattern is not found — it is remembered.
One program. Seven scales. The body is the meeting point.
Layer
Water table — below the soil.
Use
Read as one would read a grimoire.
Two ◇ The axiom
Only the time signatures differ
Healing, integration, and expansion all operate by the same mechanics — regardless of the scale at which they are occurring. What is true at the cellular level is true at the cosmic level. The conditions are the same. The process is the same. Only the time signatures differ.
The Living Pattern is the water table underneath the soil. The five cellular healing conditions are the soil. The pattern is the deeper structure the soil itself draws from — the cosmic time signature every cell is moving in.
You do not reach up to the cosmos. You remember it is inside you. Every scale is running the same program. What changes is resolution — the zoom level at which you are observing the pattern. The work is helping a body read the pattern at the scale of itself, so it can recognise the pattern everywhere else.
The five conditions are not announced. They operate the way fascia operates — you do not see it, you feel its absence when it is compromised. The framework leads with experience. The architecture is what is secretly organising everything you are moving through. This means the framework is discoverable. People find their way to the architecture through their own body, not through being taught a system.
A theory of everything not because it explains everything — because it is present everywhere. In the cell. In the cry. In the return of Saturn. In the water that was glacier before it was you.
Three ◇ The seven scales
The same movement, seven resolutions
One program, seven zoom levels, the body as the meeting point.
The Cell
The mitochondria either produce or withhold. The membrane either opens or protects. Every cellular decision is a pattern of safety, resource, signal, and completion. Everything else is this, magnified.
The Body
The nervous system, the fascia, the lymph — communication infrastructure speaking the same language as the cell. What a single mitochondrion does inside a muscle, the whole muscle does inside the body, with more time and more witnesses.
The Pair Bond
Co-regulation is bilateral. Two systems in tension seeking integration. Relationship is the cell membrane at human scale: what is allowed in, what is kept out, what gets metabolised, what gets cleared.
The Year
Winter is dorsal time. Spring is the bilateral re-cross. Summer is solar peak. Autumn is the lymphatic clearing. The seasons are not a metaphor for the body — the body and the season are running the same code at different bandwidths.
The Cycle
Twenty-eight days of nervous-system rhythm. The dark moon is parasympathetic deep — the body's request for stillness. The full moon is sympathetic peak — the body's permission to be seen.
The Planets
Slow time signatures the body keeps. The long arcs of the same conditions — clearing, building, signalling, completing — operating on the cell's longest timeline.
The Pattern
At the largest scale, the pattern is the field. Galaxies as nervous systems on a cosmic timeline. Ecosystems as tissues. The death-rebirth cycle running from the apoptotic cell all the way up to the supernova. There is no scale at which the pattern stops.
Four ◇ The five conditions
Five conditions, everywhere
Never announced. Operating like fascia — you feel their absence when they are compromised. The framework leads with the body's experience; the architecture is what is quietly organising it.
Safety
Ventral tone. The membrane is permeable because nothing is threatening it.
Resource
Fuel available. Mineral, fat, breath, sleep, sun. The cell that has fuel can choose. The cell that does not, defends.
Signal
The message gets through. Hormone meets receptor. Word meets ear. Truth meets witness.
Clearing
Lymph flows. Inflammation resolves. Grief moves. The dead get composted into soil.
Completion
The arc finishes. The wound closes. The cycle ends so the next begins.
Five ◇ The mechanism
Bilateral, the connective tissue
Solar
Active. Radiating. Identity. Fire. Day. Sympathetic forward motion. The cell's outward signal. The body's right side, the brain's left hemisphere. The seen. Arousal and expression, linear time, narrative self, action and aim.
Lunar
Receptive. Reflecting. Cycle. Fluid. Night. Parasympathetic depth. The cell's inward listening. The body's left side, the brain's right hemisphere. The felt. Rest and reception, cyclical time, embodied self, witness and water.
Union — the seam
Two systems in tension seeking integration — the same sentence whether you are describing a chart opposition, a co-regulation event, a bilateral pass, or hemispheric integration. The body is bilateral. The cosmos is bilateral. The mechanism is the same.
This folio is the one the technology came out of. Everything built in the research register — the bilateral visual fields, the alternating sound, the breath tool — started as an attempt to make this idea into something a person could actually stand inside.
Six ◇ Time signatures
The body's slow weather
The planets read here as tempos rather than as symbols. This is the most speculative folio in the set and the one furthest from anything demonstrable.
| Body | In this framework | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Sun | Vitality and core fire. The cell's identity, the mitochondrial fire, the annual return. | 365 days |
| Moon | Tide and fluid memory. The body's water, the fascia's mood, the dorsal-ventral pulse. | 28 days |
| Venus | Relational skin. The membrane between bodies, the pull of two systems toward meeting. | 584 days |
| Mars | Action and the strike. The sympathetic surge, the clean cut, motion toward and away. | 2 years |
| Jupiter | Resource and permission. The body's experience of plenty, renegotiated every twelve years. | 12 years |
| Saturn | Structure and the lesson. Scaffolding tested and rebuilt. What cannot hold, disintegrates. | 29 years |
| Uranus | Opening. The break that lets new signal in. A planned rupture at midlife. | 84 years |
| Pluto | The long clearing. What gets composted so the next form can grow in the dark soil. | 248 years |
Seven ◇ Element and phase
Porosity, not personality
The water element read as a description of permeability. The phases of the moon read as a description of pulse. In this framework neither is a feeling; both are proposed as mechanics.
The water signs
Cancer, the shoreline — permeable in defined containers. Scorpio, the wellspring — permeable in depth, not breadth. Pisces, the ocean — permeable everywhere, boundary as choice rather than given. Water is not what these signs are. Water is the description of the membrane the chart inherited.
The lunar phases
Dark: dorsal floor, the body's request for stillness. Waxing: ventral building, gathering toward output. Full: sympathetic peak, permission to be seen. Waning: parasympathetic clearing, the cell sweeping its own room.
Eight ◇ The close
Not because it explains everything
A theory of everything not because it explains everything. Because it is present everywhere.
In the cell. In the cry. In the return of Saturn. In the water that was glacier before it was you.
The pattern is not something you find. It is something you remember. And remembering it, in the body, is what is meant here by the work.
The signal is real. The first translation may not be.
06Public interest
Developed as
public work.
Living Pattern is currently being developed as an open-ended artistic and technological inquiry rather than a commercial wellness product. The goal is to explore how creative technology can make difficult-to-describe embodied experiences more visible, participatory, and discussable.
Why this matters
Much of human experience is difficult to translate into language.
Healthcare often relies on symptoms that can be named and measured. Technology frequently reduces people to data. Art can operate somewhere else: in sensation, association, movement, image, sound, memory, ambiguity, and relationship.
Living Pattern asks whether technology can be designed not simply to measure a body, but to help a person notice one. The project explores what becomes possible when artistic practice, embodied experience, and technology meet without requiring one discipline to dominate the others.
Research interests
- Embodied and sensory literacy
- Nervous-system perception
- Bilateral visual and auditory experience
- Moving image as an experiential interface
- Trauma-informed interaction design
- Visualisation of subjective experience
- Accessible self-observation tools
- Art as a bridge between lived experience and scientific inquiry
- Non-clinical tools for reflection and communication
- Relationships between bodies, environments, rhythms and systems
Design principles
- ConsentNothing is collected, recorded or inferred without a person choosing it, in plain language, each time.
- PrivacyTools run in the browser with no accounts and no analytics. If personal data is ever involved, it stays on the person's own device.
- AccessibilityKeyboard navigation, readable contrast, reduced-motion support and low bandwidth are build requirements, not later additions.
- AgencyA person can leave, stop, slow down or delete at any point without losing anything they came with.
- Non-diagnosisNothing here scores, rates, screens or diagnoses. Ambiguity is protected rather than resolved.
- Trauma-informed designNo forced sensory input, no countdowns, no streaks, no pressure to continue, no reward for returning.
Living Pattern is an artistic research project. It is not medical treatment, diagnosis, psychotherapy, or a substitute for professional healthcare. References to biology, nervous-system function, astrology, mythology, ecology and cosmology may operate across scientific, speculative, autobiographical and poetic registers. The project identifies those distinctions wherever possible.
07The artist
Eden King
Artist · writer · filmmaker · designer · creative technologist. Washington, D.C.
Eden King is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, designer, creative technologist and emerging experimental filmmaker whose work investigates what happens when human bodies encounter human systems.
Her practice moves between the intimate and the systemic, using art, film, writing, food, environments, hospitality, research and technology to make invisible structures visible. She is self-taught as a technologist and builds her own work — positioning, identity, structure and code.
Living Pattern grew out of a long attempt to describe states that resisted description, and out of the tools she kept building when nothing existing did what was needed. Rather than offering a universal protocol, the project asks how people might become more literate in the languages of their own bodies — while remaining curious about what those signals can and cannot tell us.
The wider practice
Living Pattern is one of several projects asking the same question from different directions: how do we make the invisible legible?
- The Living PatternBody, technology and moving image. Artist-led research and public tools.
- New MythologyExperimental digital essays and artistic research, published as an imprint.
- Translate the WildBody literacy, food, observation and field practices.
- God's ArmourExperimental documentary and moving image, in production.
- Paradise Over PowerPublic-education research into the business models underneath American systems.
08Collaborate
Currently
seeking.
This project is intentionally still in development. Support at this stage helps determine what the technology becomes.
- Artist residencies
- Research residencies
- New-media and creative-technology grants
- Experimental film support
- Women and emerging-artist funding
- Technical mentorship
- Creative coding collaborators
- Interaction designers
- Projection and spatial-media expertise
- Physical-computing mentorship
- Research partners
- Health-humanities collaborators
- Trauma-informed design advisors
- Institutional partners
- Exhibition and prototype opportunities
- Development and production funding
For funders and collaborators
The project on one page
You do not need to read the cosmology to assess this project. Everything a reviewer needs is here.
- Project
- The Living Pattern — artist-led research into body, technology and moving image.
- Artist
- Eden King. Multidisciplinary artist, writer, filmmaker, designer and self-taught creative technologist, based in Washington, D.C.
- Research question
- Can technology be designed not simply to measure a body, but to help a person notice one?
- Public benefit
- Free, browser-based, account-free tools for embodied observation, plus moving-image work and writing released publicly rather than sold.
- Technology
- Static, dependency-free web builds; bilateral visual and auditory experience; generative moving image; proposed work in projection, spatial audio and environmental sensing.
- Current stage
- Early and deliberately unfinished. Several public tools exist; the moving-image work is in production; the installation and sensing work is proposed.
- What exists
- Published web tools, a body of paintings, short experimental moving-image works, and eight folios of written research.
- What is proposed
- Installation environments, projection and spatial-media work, physical computing, and voluntary, privacy-first sensing.
- Development needs
- Technical mentorship, creative-coding collaborators, spatial-media expertise, exhibition context, and production funding.
- Potential outcomes
- A public exhibition or installation, a family of free accessible tools, a documentary work, and published research notes.
- Ethics
- Non-diagnostic by design. Consent, privacy, accessibility and user ownership of data are foundational rather than retrofitted.
- Contact
- edenkingcreative@gmail.com