CROSSLUCID at The Window presented by CHANEL Culture Fund

Available for viewing 24 hours a day, The Window is a site-specific public art project by the CHANEL Culture Fund that creates access to cutting-edge artworks by artists exploring the breadth of today’s digital technologies. Previous artists featured include Jacolby Satterwhite, Refik Anadol, Cao Fei, Sarah Meyohas, Lu Yang and most recently Studio DRIFT. 

The Window, a public art project by the CHANEL Culture Fund, will present Red The Ocean Around U by CROSSLUCID & Orion Facey from March 2 to June 2, 2025. 


Launching on 2 March, Red The Ocean Around U (2024) invites viewers into an immersive and continuously evolving narrative ecosystem, highlighting the notion of games as a poetic manipulation of agency. A symbiotic collaboration between CROSSLUCID and the sci-fi writer Orion Facey, the artwork guides viewers through an otherworldly landscape populated with non-human beings such as phoenixes and druids created with multiple interactive generative AI agents that dynamically transform the work as new inputs are introduced. Creating a world in which technology and imagination collide, Red The Ocean Around U proposes an alternate mythology built upon a new set of interactions between mystical experiences and AI fantasies. In this liminal space, time, technology and the future unfold otherwise.

Non-human beings such as phoenixes, omens and druids interact with artificial intelligences to co-create an alter-mythology that helps navigate the borderlines between mystical experience and AI hallucination. Testing the boundaries of latent space and the universe that escapes consciousness, artist collective CROSSLUCID and writer Orion Facey explored ineffable languages to describe multi-species affect. In this liminal space, time, technology and the future unfold otherwise.

Red the Ocean Around U proposes a non-linear narrative through an interactive and generative digital environment. The visitors are invited to participate on a journey through those oneiric landscapes, which will lead them to multiple endings. No pathway is the same. The story grows with their interactions. The visitor becomes U, a character who has to decide whether to adopt or return two stolen creatures. U is guided by the questions of Claude, an otherworldly character, itself a Large Language Model (LLM).

The authors reverse the traditional interaction with AI: the users are the ones who are left with Claude's questions. These queries are generated by LLMs trained on Facey's texts and the voice is produced using a model that fuses the voice of the artists and the author. Meanwhile, the AIs are also producing a dynamic space evolving in relation to different data points coming from the visitors, like the amount of people in the same location of the journey or their specific responses and their data sweat. These processes provoke an elastic balance that distributes agency between participants and non-human entities. Through these alchemical relations, Red the Ocean Around U aims to break the solidification of preconceived conditions to free the human and non-human imagination.

Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation.