Lab.
The edge, before it becomes the centre.
Yūgen Lab explores what comes after content. Cultural R&D, speculative design, and immersive prototypes that test how technology should feel.
The experiment.
Emotionally responsive interfaces. Spatial storytelling. New cultural objects like Hearables and The Unnamed, where products and language evolve together.
This is where Narrative Architecture stays honest: where the method meets conditions it hasn't encountered yet, and comes back changed.
Futures you can feel.
This is where Narrative Architecture stays honest: where the method meets conditions it hasn't encountered yet, and comes back changed.
Futures you can feel.
The Unnamed.
Language design | Cultural R&D | Human–AI
The feelings are here. The words aren’t yet.
The Unnamed.
The feelings are here. The words aren’t yet. A living glossary of AI collaboration that captures the inner weather of working with machines: blur, vertigo, comfort, ache.
Built as a curated submission platform, The Unnamed turns unspoken sensations into shared vocabulary, making the invisible shifts in agency, intimacy, and attention speakable.
Not productivity hacks. Not tool reviews. The felt experience, the body signal, the change in the room.
Launching with a carousel of new words and an open invitation to submit a feeling, it’s cultural R&D for humans trying to stay human whilst the tools get smarter.
Browse the words.
Submit a feeling.
Help name the new terrain.
Role: Self-initiated. Conceived, designed, and built end-to-end, concept, platform architecture, visual identity, and editorial direction.
Built as a curated submission platform, The Unnamed turns unspoken sensations into shared vocabulary, making the invisible shifts in agency, intimacy, and attention speakable.
Not productivity hacks. Not tool reviews. The felt experience, the body signal, the change in the room.
Launching with a carousel of new words and an open invitation to submit a feeling, it’s cultural R&D for humans trying to stay human whilst the tools get smarter.
Browse the words.
Submit a feeling.
Help name the new terrain.
Role: Self-initiated. Conceived, designed, and built end-to-end, concept, platform architecture, visual identity, and editorial direction.
What the Ground Holds.
Language design | Cultural R&D
A Field Guide to Felt Places.
One person's reading of the world. Partial, subjective, unfinished.
One person's reading of the world. Partial, subjective, unfinished.
What the Ground Holds.
We have more ways to find places than ever. We have fewer ways to feel them.
What the Ground Holds is a field guide to places as they are experienced: cities, parks, small towns, and in-between spaces, layered with memory, atmosphere, and lived attention. Some places described here still exist. Some have changed. Some are gone. That is not a limitation. It is the point.
This is not a guide for finding things. It is a record of noticing them.
Places are documented through felt qualities: why they mattered, what they held, what stayed. Not recommendations. Not rankings. A different kind of orientation, one that treats memory, taste, and lived experience as valid forms of navigation.
The first entry is already written. In 1999, we moved into a warehouse in Plough Yard, Shoreditch. We did not know that three metres below our floor lay the walls of the Curtain Theatre: the stage where Shakespeare's company performed Romeo and Juliet for the first time, in 1597. We lived there for five years. We made the founding work of Hi-ReS! We had not known.
Places change. The signal in the ground stays.
Role: Conceived and authored the framework and first edition, designing a new language for navigating places by human signal.
What the Ground Holds is a field guide to places as they are experienced: cities, parks, small towns, and in-between spaces, layered with memory, atmosphere, and lived attention. Some places described here still exist. Some have changed. Some are gone. That is not a limitation. It is the point.
This is not a guide for finding things. It is a record of noticing them.
Places are documented through felt qualities: why they mattered, what they held, what stayed. Not recommendations. Not rankings. A different kind of orientation, one that treats memory, taste, and lived experience as valid forms of navigation.
The first entry is already written. In 1999, we moved into a warehouse in Plough Yard, Shoreditch. We did not know that three metres below our floor lay the walls of the Curtain Theatre: the stage where Shakespeare's company performed Romeo and Juliet for the first time, in 1597. We lived there for five years. We made the founding work of Hi-ReS! We had not known.
Places change. The signal in the ground stays.
Role: Conceived and authored the framework and first edition, designing a new language for navigating places by human signal.
Reanimated.
The lost web | Flash-era | Cultural memory
Flash-era web experiences from the Hi-ReS! archive, restored as living digital works.
Reanimated.
Selected Flash-era works are restored from their original files and brought back into contemporary browsers, preserving not only how they looked and sounded, but how they behaved.
Witnesses to another kind of web.
These works return to a different internet than the one they left.
They were created for a web of loading bars, unstable connections and quieter attention. A web in which entering a site could mean surrendering to its world.
Today, they reappear among feeds, notifications and relentless acceleration. Their technology has become obsolete, but their ideas have not.
They are no longer only websites.
They are witnesses to another way of imagining the internet.
Reanimated is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is an investigation into digital memory, obsolete technology and the preservation of interactive experience.
What survives when the technology disappears? What must remain untouched? And what kind of intervention allows a digital work to live again without becoming a reconstruction of itself?
Each experience runs from its original Flash files. The imagery, sound, interaction, timing and imperfections remain intact.
Contemporary technology provides the new doorway, allowing the works to run within modern browsers.
Some pieces are entered directly. Others sit within a simple room that allows visitors to move directly between their worlds, because the web no longer waits the way it did.
Reanimated is an ongoing Yūgen Lab project conceived, directed and restored by Alexandra Jugović, co-founder of Hi-ReS! and co-creator of many of the works in its archive, originally created with their respective teams, clients and collaborators.
An evolving archive
Reanimated will grow as further works are recovered from the Hi-ReS! archive.
Each restoration presents a different challenge: obsolete systems, missing connections and technologies that no longer exist.
The aim is not to modernise the work, but to preserve its original logic, atmosphere and behaviour, creating the smallest possible doorway through which it can live again.
Witnesses to another kind of web.
These works return to a different internet than the one they left.
They were created for a web of loading bars, unstable connections and quieter attention. A web in which entering a site could mean surrendering to its world.
Today, they reappear among feeds, notifications and relentless acceleration. Their technology has become obsolete, but their ideas have not.
They are no longer only websites.
They are witnesses to another way of imagining the internet.
Reanimated is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is an investigation into digital memory, obsolete technology and the preservation of interactive experience.
What survives when the technology disappears? What must remain untouched? And what kind of intervention allows a digital work to live again without becoming a reconstruction of itself?
Each experience runs from its original Flash files. The imagery, sound, interaction, timing and imperfections remain intact.
Contemporary technology provides the new doorway, allowing the works to run within modern browsers.
Some pieces are entered directly. Others sit within a simple room that allows visitors to move directly between their worlds, because the web no longer waits the way it did.
Reanimated is an ongoing Yūgen Lab project conceived, directed and restored by Alexandra Jugović, co-founder of Hi-ReS! and co-creator of many of the works in its archive, originally created with their respective teams, clients and collaborators.
An evolving archive
Reanimated will grow as further works are recovered from the Hi-ReS! archive.
Each restoration presents a different challenge: obsolete systems, missing connections and technologies that no longer exist.
The aim is not to modernise the work, but to preserve its original logic, atmosphere and behaviour, creating the smallest possible doorway through which it can live again.
Entry 01. moshi-moshi.
MOSHI-MOSHI.COM | NTT Data · HI-RES! 2001
Originally created in Flash by Hi-ReS! for NTT Data’s Mind the Banner project in Japan, moshi-moshi.com responded to the theme LOVE YOUR?
A small digital world of geometric environments, shifting between day and night.
There is no explanation and no destination. Only a landscape to enter, move through and briefly inhabit.
Originally created in Flash by Hi-ReS! for NTT Data’s Mind the Banner project in Japan, moshi-moshi.com responded to the theme LOVE YOUR?
A small digital world of geometric environments, shifting between day and night.
There is no explanation and no destination. Only a landscape to enter, move through and briefly inhabit.
Entry 02. i-move-u.
IMOVEU.COM | MITSUBISHI MOTORS · DENTSU · AOI · HI-RES! 2002
Originally created in Flash by Hi-ReS! in Tokyo, with Dentsu and AOI, i-move-u was the last in a series of experimental sites for Mitsubishi, each exploring movement in a new way.
We built it on a single idea: the disappearance of the space between A and B. We focus on the destination and neglect the journey.
On i-move-u.com, the journey became the destination.
Best on desktop: you walk these worlds with the arrow keys on your keyboard, the way the web worked in 2002.
A phone will show you part of the piece, but you'll want a keyboard to navigate it.
IMOVEU.COM | MITSUBISHI MOTORS · DENTSU · AOI · HI-RES! 2002
Originally created in Flash by Hi-ReS! in Tokyo, with Dentsu and AOI, i-move-u was the last in a series of experimental sites for Mitsubishi, each exploring movement in a new way.
We built it on a single idea: the disappearance of the space between A and B. We focus on the destination and neglect the journey.
On i-move-u.com, the journey became the destination.
Best on desktop: you walk these worlds with the arrow keys on your keyboard, the way the web worked in 2002.
A phone will show you part of the piece, but you'll want a keyboard to navigate it.
Entry 03. Requiem for a Dream.
REQUIEMFORADREAM.COM | DARREN ARONOFSKY · ARTISAN ENTERTAINMENT · HI-RES! 2000
REQUIEMFORADREAM.COM | DARREN ARONOFSKY · ARTISAN ENTERTAINMENT · HI-RES! 2000
Originally created by Hi-ReS! Alexandra Jugović and Florian Schmitt in collaboration with Darren Aronofsky, requiemforadream.com was conceived as an extension of the film rather than a promotion for it.
The visitor becomes a character, gradually losing control.
As the story moves from summer to winter, the site decays with it. White becomes grey, then black. The image begins to destroy itself. Sound falls from 16-bit to 1-bit. The experience becomes increasingly unstable until, eventually, it rejects you.
The site does not describe the film.
It performs its psychological descent.
Kept as it was.
One enter, then the site owns you.
The visitor becomes a character, gradually losing control.
As the story moves from summer to winter, the site decays with it. White becomes grey, then black. The image begins to destroy itself. Sound falls from 16-bit to 1-bit. The experience becomes increasingly unstable until, eventually, it rejects you.
The site does not describe the film.
It performs its psychological descent.
Kept as it was.
One enter, then the site owns you.
Entry 04. Donnie Darko.
DONNIEDARKO.COM | RICHARD KELLY · NEW MARKET FILMS · HI-RES! 2001e work.
DONNIEDARKO.COM | RICHARD KELLY · NEW MARKET FILMS · HI-RES! 2001e work.
Originally created by Hi-ReS! Alexandra Jugović and Florian Schmitt in collaboration with Richard Kelly, donniedarko.com served as a prologue and epilogue to the film.
Released in phases around its US theatrical release, the site extended the film’s world beyond the screen.
There were no trailers, cast biographies or conventional navigation.
Instead: documents, voices, hidden clues, fragmented narratives and apparent malfunctions.
We created three levels and ran out of time. Visitors searched forums for levels four to seven, convinced that more of the story remained hidden.
The searching became part of the work.
Kept as it was.
It still refuses to explain itself.
Released in phases around its US theatrical release, the site extended the film’s world beyond the screen.
There were no trailers, cast biographies or conventional navigation.
Instead: documents, voices, hidden clues, fragmented narratives and apparent malfunctions.
We created three levels and ran out of time. Visitors searched forums for levels four to seven, convinced that more of the story remained hidden.
The searching became part of the work.
Kept as it was.
It still refuses to explain itself.
Hearables.
Speculative design | Wearables | Culture
A new category concept: hearing technology redesigned as wearable culture.
Hearables.
Hearables is a speculative design concept that reimagines hearing tech as wearable culture: objects people choose rather than medical devices they hide. It explores the ear as a site of identity through jewellery-led forms, heirloom shells engineered for existing devices, and future-facing partnerships between audio, fashion, and AI.
We're looking for collaborators across Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, jewellery and industrial design, audiology, audio engineering, and fashion to help pilot the first expression.
Role: Self-initiated. Conceived and directed the concept and design thesis. Currently in development. Private brief available on request.
We're looking for collaborators across Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, jewellery and industrial design, audiology, audio engineering, and fashion to help pilot the first expression.
Role: Self-initiated. Conceived and directed the concept and design thesis. Currently in development. Private brief available on request.
Why it matters.
The Lab isn't separate from the practice. It's where the practice stays alive.
Studio and Dōjō are sharper because of what we test here.
At the edge, before it becomes the centre.
Studio and Dōjō are sharper because of what we test here.
At the edge, before it becomes the centre.
Collaborate.
Lab projects happen through partnerships, residencies, and pilots.
Want to prototype with us?
Reach out directly.
alexandra@yugenstud.io
Signal first. Then build.
Lab projects happen through partnerships, residencies, and pilots.
Want to prototype with us?
Reach out directly.
alexandra@yugenstud.io
Signal first. Then build.