Under the hood of arkadata.com
The homepage is not decorated by music. It is a small reactive system: colour, particles, light, identity and scene state all move from the same obsession with synchronicity. Here is how it works, and how it is built.
The demo is implicit
The site can say that ARKADATA builds systems for sound, image, interaction and synchronicity, but the hero has to prove it before the copy explains it. When a track plays, the palette shifts, the particle field breathes with the audio, and the GL2 scene reacts as a single instrument rather than a pile of effects.
That is the point: the visitor should feel the music changing the page before they know what module is doing the work.
Identity as a state
ARKADATA and Pierre Daunis are not competing names. The wordmark can decode from one to the other on hover or focus, then flip back the next time. ARKADATA is the signal, the alias and the world. Pierre Daunis is the person, the contact and the professional surface. The scramble is small because the idea is not hacker theatre. It is a quick identity decode.
The reactivity layer
The $lib/reactivity/ module is the contract layer between music state and visual
state. It keeps the site from becoming a hand-animated skin. Track colour, live audio drive,
fixture toggles, authored curves, skyline state and field parameters can all speak through
named state instead of one-off animation tricks.
Music
Tracks carry colour and intensity. Playback is a state driver, not an embed.
Field
The FormField particles are audio reactive, with authored control as the target.
Scene
The GL2 skyline, membrane, glow and light behaviour read as one connected surface.
Authoring
REAKT turns MIDI and drawn curves into reusable inputs that can bind to real params.
From a WordPress brochure to a system
The previous arkadata.com was a WordPress and YOOtheme build. Fine as a brochure, never going to host what this concept needs: an audio-driven GL hero, a colour system the music itself moves, visuals wired to the structure of a track. A CMS fights all of that. So I left it and kept only what was worth keeping, the typographic chassis and the proportions.
The rebuild is SvelteKit on a static adapter. No backend, no database, plain JavaScript. The constraints are the point: a fully static, owned surface with nothing to breach on a server and nothing to rot. Everything interesting happens on the client, by design.
Under the hood
The core move is that the homepage does not advertise the work, it runs it. The moving parts:
- Reactive GL hero: the FormField particle field plus a WebGL2 skyline, on one context.
- OKLCH theme system, re-tinted live by the playing track.
- GL contexts that persist across navigation instead of tearing down, no per-route recompile.
- The whole reactive pipeline driven by named state, not per-element animation.
Release context
The timing changes the meaning of the portfolio. If the site lands alongside Gestalt, ARKITEKT, and potentially Cookodex, the Projects section stops reading like a promise pile and becomes a launch hub. The folio is not only showing past work. It is hosting the current ecosystem.
TRANSFERENCE can carry the musical proof. There are twenty-five to thirty tracks in progress; the public version does not need to dump all of them. It needs a curated selection that reads like signals from the project: combat, ambient, recall, system, engram, residue.
The rule
Reactivity is allowed to be visible. It is not allowed to beat readability. The hero can perform because that is where the spectacle belongs. The inner pages should stay clearer, colder and more operational, like a control surface after the instrument has made its point.