Cora is a collaborative web experience by Jon Somerscales and Enrico “Mad” Paiardi, created for CODAME ART+TECH. Using body tracking and websockets, it lets participants experience themselves as a particle system — connected in real time with others.
A gentle, expansive answer to “what is the New Human?” Not one body, but a holobiont. A coral.
The concept
The coral holobiont — the coral animal together with all of its symbiotic organisms — is one of the most interdependent living systems on earth. No single organism could survive alone; the whole is radically greater than the sum of its parts.
Cora takes this as its model for human connection. Each participant becomes a node: a body rendered as particles, aware of every other body in the network. Movement propagates through the system. Presence is legible. The collective breathes.
The experience runs entirely in the browser. Body tracking happens locally via camera, with pose data shared across participants through websockets — no installation, no downloads. The work premiered at CODAME × Milan Design Week, April 2026.
Research
Making of
Experience the work
Cora[0] — the zeroth element of a minimum viable regenerative art — is also shown at CODAME ART+TECH. View on CODAME ↗
Credits
- Concept & design
- Jon Somerscales
- Creative technology
- Enrico "Mad" Paiardi
- 3D models
- Smithsonian Institution
- Presented by
- CODAME ART+TECH