Generative Islands — the machinery
A Seapunk community experiment · Zach Hyman & Jules Yim
What a node is
The world is a database of 79 entities — characters, protocols, objects, locations, jobs and ghosts — each holding a one-line identity, its vessel and tools, an authored voice sample, an opening line, its realm, its source document, its contributor, and its connections to other entities. Scenes are places those entities stand in; story nodes are authored camera positions inside scenes, joined by authored actions. Nothing in the graph is generated at runtime: every node, pin, caption and choice existed before any visitor arrived.
Which relations are authored, and which are generated
All of them are authored. Entity connections, scene pins, the story tree and its forks come from the canon documents (workshop outputs, published fiction, essays) via a reviewed database. The only generated material a visitor encounters is conversation: live replies spoken in character over the Claude API, from a system prompt assembled out of that entity's reviewed fields — identity, voice sample, tools, grounding, connections — and nothing else.
Provenance, shown in the interface
Every speaking entity carries a Grounded in field naming the real practices it extrapolates from, with reference links checked against the Wikipedia API before inclusion (88 verified links; one deliberate omission where English Wikipedia uses an exonym the communities reject). Research claims cite the literature directly — Ping Lin's entry cites a peer-reviewed systematic review on evacuation behaviour in older adults. Each entity names its source document and contributor.
The convenings — real events, real people
Every entity in this world was first written by people in a room. The gatherings all keep public records at seapunkstudios.notion.site:
- Khlongs & Subaks Workshop (Bangkok, April 2025) — five days on water-based urbanisms and distributed protocols.
- Seapunk Midsummer Studio (Chiang Mai, July 2025) — nine days of writing and worldbuilding, including the Good Ghosting workplayshop where Loyalty was written.
- Seapunk Proto-College — a site for pedagogical experimentation around alternate ways to future.
- Snow Society Cli-Fi Exhibition and the Shanzhai Climate Agency at Bangkok Climate Action Week — where the SNOW realm met the public.
- South Beast Asia — the released imagination this exhibit's Ward 47 belongs to.
- Ongoing: the Seapunk newsletter carries debriefs of each convening.
The working review sheet behind this prototype stays private because it holds contributors' contact details and unapproved drafts — researchers can request view access from the authors.
Contradictions, hallucinations, departures from canon
Voices reach the app only through a human gate: proposed voices sit in a shared review sheet and merge only when an author marks them approved. At runtime, each character is instructed to stay inside its own knowledge, told which world it lives in (realm descriptions are drawn from the canon essays, so a South Beast Asia entity cannot answer for SNOW), and told to refuse what it could not know. We test this with an adversarial bait suite — extraction attempts, false premises, cross-realm probes, authority claims — run against the live endpoint and reviewed by the authors.
Consent, retention, withdrawal
The prototype retains nothing, by construction. Conversations stream from the language model to the visitor's screen and are not stored; there is no database behind the chat and no analytics on its content. The consent gate on entry states this. Any future folding of visitor contributions into canon is opt-in and passes through the same human review gate as everything else; contributor credits are strictly opt-in, and nobody is named without confirmation.
Costs, throughput, offline behaviour
Conversations are bounded by design: replies cap at 700 tokens, each visitor at 12 turns per conversation and 12 requests per minute. Everything except live conversation — the scenes, the story tree, both long-form readers, all canon cards — is static and works without the language model; if the API is unreachable, the exhibit degrades to a fully navigable authored world rather than failing.
Generative tooling, disclosed
Scene artwork and loops were generated with Gemini image and video models from author-written prompts, reviewed and re-prompted against canon (and frequently rejected); character voices are drafted by authors or with Claude and pass human review; conversations run on Claude with the constraints above. The build process — including the failures — is documented as part of the research.
Sources: SNOW / Shanzhai Climate Agency deck · Chronicle Session 01 · Patchworked Protocols (Hyman & Yan Naung Oak) · A SEA of Distributed AI (Chua) · Loyalty (Hyman, Protocolized 2025) · Good Ghosting workshop · Seapunk community convenings