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A den built from code
Hibernaculum is a fictional wildlife field station, created as an AI-built exhibition piece. Its subject is real animal torpor; its institution and the den visitors explore are imagined. The site’s signature move is to make scrolling feel like a descent into winter: as the visitor moves below the frost line, the interface slows along with the animals it describes.
The journey follows a hedgehog from active foraging toward deep torpor. Her pulse begins at 190 beats per minute and reaches eight in the den. That change is more than a number in a caption. It sets the tempo for the page’s motion, so the science becomes part of the browsing experience.
canvas drawing tablet for digital art
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From brief to field guide
The site follows a three-pass pipeline: build the code-only exhibition and its scroll-linked physiology, critique it mercilessly across the narrative and responsive details, then certify the result through an art-director review. The accompanying field guide documents the concept, visual interaction techniques, design tokens and a concise recipe for reproducing the approach.
The full build notes live in the room’s design guide.
responsive web design development kit
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Reading the cold
The visual system pairs warm den umber with a restrained torpor blue and a muted gold for reserves. Spring green stays out of view until the final section, where its sudden arrival marks the return to activity. Cormorant Garamond gives the exhibition titles a literary, field-notebook character; IBM Plex Mono handles readings, coordinates and specimen labels. Both typefaces are self-hosted.
One shared rhythm
Scroll depth feeds a shared state that eases the pulse, temperature and pace toward their winter values. Animation durations use that pace, and section reveals grow more deliberate as the visitor descends. Narrow windows interrupt the descent with brief arousal spikes before the final emergence into spring.
Other instruments make the den feel studied rather than merely illustrated. A fixed rail marks depth; an atlas changes its cavity diagram for different animal architectures; and a reserve ledger estimates covered nights while accounting for arousal costs. Stillness below the frost line lets code-drawn ice trace across the screen, then movement breaks it. Snow, roots, leaves and animal forms are drawn with canvas, inline SVG and CSS. There are no image assets or external visual libraries.
The exhibit also accounts for visitors and devices. Its single canvas loop pauses when the document is hidden, and reduced-motion settings preserve the information in a static presentation. On emergence, the snow reverses and quickens, and spring green finally appears.
Want this? Paste this into your AI coding agent
Build a single-page showcase website from this art-direction brief. Work like an elite creative frontend engineer; commit totally to the direction.
BRIEF (room 169 of 175, “hibernaculum”):
HIBERNACULUM — where winter sleeps (fictional wildlife station, real torpor physiology). Aesthetic: a den in cross-section; biology at 8 beats per minute. Palette: den umber, torpor blue, fat-reserve gold, spring green (finale only). Fonts: cormorant-garamond (display), ibm-plex-mono (vitals). SIGNATURE: TORPOR PACE — the deeper you scroll, the slower the site’s metabolism: animations decelerate, transitions thicken like cold honey, and a heart-rate monitor drops 190→8 bpm (hedgehog) with body temperature falling beside it — the PAGE ITSELF enters torpor with its subject. Mid-winter AROUSAL EVENTS interrupt (brief, expensive warm spikes — the mystery of why explained: immune sweeps, sleep debt, a drink). Den cross-sections per species (hedgehog leaf-ball, bear rock den, dormouse teacup coil), the fat-arithmetic ledger (grams in vs nights out), frost-line depth gauge. SPRING EMERGENCE finale: pace snaps back, palette wakes green. Unforgettable: a website hibernating under your hands.STACK: pure HTML/CSS/JS, no build step, no frameworks, no CDNs or external requests of any kind; self-hosted fonts only; every visual is code (CSS/SVG/canvas/WebGL) — no image assets required.
QUALITY BAR: flawless at 390px, 834px and 1440px with zero horizontal overflow; tap targets >= 44px; semantic landmarks, focus-visible styles, body-text contrast >= 4.5:1; prefers-reduced-motion pauses or simplifies heavy animation; rAF loops pause when the tab is hidden; hold 60fps (cap particle counts, avoid layout thrash); rich invented content everywhere — real-sounding names, numbers and program notes, never lorem ipsum; orchestrate one beautiful staggered load moment plus scroll and hover surprises. FORBIDDEN: Inter/Roboto/Arial/system-ui, purple-gradient-on-white, and cookie-cutter hero+cards+footer layouts.
PROCESS: iterate in three documented passes — (1) build plus builder self-critique, (2) merciless external critique finding and fixing at least ten real problems, (3) art-director elevation from good to unforgettable. Screenshot at all three widths every pass and fix everything you can see.
— Original brief by Claude Fable 5 (art director), executed by the FABLE/175 pipeline.
— This room lives at https://fable-25-830.netlify.app/sites/hibernaculum/
This is the verbatim art-direction brief that produced the room — exposed by the exhibition itself via the “Prompt” link in the room’s footer.
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Enter the den
Visit the live Hibernaculum room to follow its descent into torpor and its return to spring. Browse all 175 exhibition rooms at the hub.
Visit the live room → · Browse all 175 rooms
Previously in Wing VII
- Room 161: Station Chiroptera — Read the Dark by Echo
- Room 163: MARU-K — Aisle Census, 03:12
- Room 155: Luciole — The Synchronous Fireflies of Vallon Creux
FABLE / 175 is a finished exhibition of 175 fundamentally different websites, each built end-to-end by an AI. This article is part of our series walking through it room by room.
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