JoyCocoon & JOYGAZE

Participatory AI Art Project About Communal Noticing, Play, and Everyday Joy

JoyGaze and JoyCocoon are Skye Von’s participatory artworks exploring how we shape our inner and outer reality through the way we look at the world. Influenced by her Buddhist Vipassana practice and the teachings of The Power of Now, the projects begin with a simple premise: our gaze is an act of choice. JoyGaze invites people to notice heart-shaped forms in their surroundings and transform these observations into co-created artworks using AI. By repeatedly noticing heart-shaped forms and transforming them into co-created artworks, participants cultivate a sustained shift in attention that not only alters what they see but also gradually changes how they approach life.

JoyCocoon expands this practice into a communal, physical space, surrounding and immersing visitors with the artworks they help generate.

By blending mindful attention with creative participation, the two works turn everyday noticing into a practice of agency, emotional grounding and quiet transformation.

  • Launch Date 2026 TBA

  • JoyGaze is the digital entry point into the work, where participants actively shape the creative process. They photograph heart-shaped forms in the world, upload them to the app, and guide the transformation of these images into artworks or short meditative videos through their own prompts and selections. The use of AI is intentional: it lowers the barrier to artistic expression, enabling anyone to participate fully in making the work.

    By pairing intentional perception with creative decision-making, JoyGaze offers a daily practice that gently reinforces presence and agency. The project draws on findings highlighted in studies and books such as The Brain on Art (2023), which show that even small, repeated acts of creativity can meaningfully influence emotional wellbeing. Each act of observing and creating becomes a small but accumulative intervention in how participants relate to their environment and to themselves.

JOYGAZE
IN DEVELOPMENT

JOYCOCOON
IN DEVELOPMENT

  • First public exhibitions planned for 2026 TBA

  • JoyCocoon is the physical counterpart to JoyGaze, designed as an environment where the emotional shift cultivated in the app becomes sensory and embodied. Drawing on the well-documented calming effects of immersive visual environments, now used in spas and wellbeing settings worldwide, the installation offers visitors a brief experience of being held inside a field of soothing, slowly shifting visual and sound.

    Inside a cylindrical, screen-wrapped space, the artworks generated through JoyGaze gently animate around the viewer, accompanied by soft music that encourages a meditative state. Visitors can tap any artwork to enlarge it and enter a full 360-degree expansion, where the piece unfolds into a visually calming, immersive sequence derived from their choices in the app.

    The JoyCocoon is not simply a gallery for displaying images. Its purpose is to provide a restorative moment in which participants feel physically surrounded by the positive attention they have been practising. The “easter egg” within the experience is the delight of finding one’s own artwork among the moving field and watching it fill the space, offering a quiet affirmation of the internal orientation JoyGaze helps cultivate.

Together, JoyGaze and JoyCocoon form a complete cycle of noticing, creating and experiencing that strengthens through repetition. The works show how deliberate attention and small creative acts can gradually shift emotional tone, making joy a more familiar and accessible state. By allowing participants to see, shape and momentarily inhabit the images they bring into the world, the project offers a brief but restorative practice of presence. What begins as a simple act of looking becomes an unfolding orientation toward clarity, uplift and a more positive way of approaching life.

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