Created on 1st January 2002

The moments of inspiration and beauty! Curious visions, sounds, scents, stories, or thoughts float and pop above our heads like soap bubbles. They startle us, uplift our spirits, and sway us towards short-lived, obscure, yet exquisite passions.

But modern life is full of steely obligations: deadline, meeting, bill payment, teeth cleaning, and endless trivial things from which we cannot turn away. Some special and exquisite moments, interposed between the muddles of life, are too soon extinguished and forgotten.

So we adapt our true sense of self to the shape of bell curve, align our tongues to the bullet-point poetry of business, and optimize our heart rate to the pace of treadmill. Life is once again reduced to rushed meals, bad coffee, bullshits to-and-fro, and a sore spine.

Alas, an enlightened person becomes an efficient "human resource".

To let a day go by without intellectual excitement, without a passionate attitude for art and beauty, without an eager appreciation of lovely useless little things around us… is to surrender oneself, indeed, to the "zombification" of hearts.

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Metaphorical.net is a collection of experiments that explores and extends my strange passions and fleeing enchantments.

I do not seek a unifying theme, but sketches that may impart lightness and intelligence to a multiplicity of things and ideas: studies of forms and patterns, nature in digital forms, awkward robots, frivolous games.

They are organized as follow, by artificial categories, in glorious bullet-points:

• Form: Explorations of forms and patterns. indeed.
• Nature: Digital works inspired by Nature.
• Obsession: Things that I spent a long time making without thinking very clearly first.
• Code: Programming is a major hurdle for artists and designers starting on interactive arts. I hope these simple examples and tutorials will help them.
• Project: Fun projects and commissions I worked on.
• Timeworn: Tired or expired works waiting for a revival.

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Metaphorical.net is created on January 2002, expanded and revised gradually throughout the years. It has received several design awards including a Webby Award in 2005, and the works have been shown in various international design reviews, exhibitions, and festivals.

Metaphorical.net is created and maintained by William Ngan. He is from Hong Kong/Canada, and therefore loves Yeung Kee roast goose just well as Canadian goose. He has a master degree from Royal College of Art in London, and is currently working in an incubation team at Microsoft Research.

Thank you for visiting!