Bloom / Release — Four Walls

Bloom / Release — Four Walls is an immersive browser installation by Mark Walhimer (b. 1964), part of the Bloom series. You enter a minimal white room in first person: click to start, then drag (or touch) to look around. Until you interact, the view slowly auto-rotates. The four walls are not static surfaces. They display a continuous garden painted on a wide offscreen canvas — soft radial-gradient blooms that grow, breathe, and fade. That panorama is sliced across North, East, South, and West (a wall counter tracks which wall you face). The cycle is deliberate: 22 blooms appear one by one, each tied to a pentatonic piano note played through Web Audio as it spawns. After the garden fills, it holds, then blooms release in reverse order — fading out with quieter notes — before the whole cycle begins again. The artwork is driven by Machine DNA, a code-based genome that gives each work a lifespan; a thin life bar at the bottom marks progress through each full pass. Bloom / Release — Four Walls is a self-contained Three.js / WebGL piece: inlined library and piano samples (Salamander Grand Piano v2, CC-BY Alexander Holm) in one HTML file, built for fullscreen viewing rather than a flat sketch page.