Matthew Li casts three sculptures in the footprint of his New York apartment, made from tapioca starch, sand and native seeds. Once planted in the city they dissolve and germinate. This site is the public archive of that disappearance.

Matthew arrived with two things: a Lovable prototype and a 10-page design PDF. They didn't match.

His words: "the Ai model was having a hard to replciation my PDF and instructions so I would actually based the design more on the PDF I sent you."

The PDF wasn't a mood board. It specified colours in LAB values, fade durations between pages, which button appears at three seconds and which at six. The prototype worked and looked roughly similar. The job was closing that gap.

Concrete deviations: the title stacked on two lines where the spec called for one horizontal line, with jagged edges instead of a grain dissolve. Transitions carried an extra white flash. Map pins 1 and 2 were swapped. Grain was applied where the spec didn't ask for it.

An interactive Leaflet map over CARTO tiles, colour-filtered to the sand tone of the design. Three sculpture pins, each with its own gallery and public archive panel sliding in from the right.

Public photo submissions on Supabase. Every upload lands unapproved in a private bucket, invisible until Matthew approves it from an admin queue. Images are compressed in the browser to a 1 MB ceiling before upload, stepping down through four resolutions and JPEG quality levels until they fit.

One QR code per sculpture, each pointing at its own upload page, so a photo taken in the street is tagged to the right sculpture without the visitor choosing anything.

Sanity CMS so Matthew edits every string himself. Four languages: English, Spanish, French and Traditional Chinese, 47 keys each.

Matthew owns all of it. Repository, hosting, domain, CMS and the API keys, every one created in his name or transferred to him. The environment variables are documented inside the repo, each with a note on which dashboard it comes from. I recommended he rotate the two sensitive keys at handover, since I'd had access during the build.

The site runs without me. If I closed my accounts tomorrow it wouldn't notice.

The sculptures install in November 2026. The archive is built, tested and deployed; the photos visible in it now are test submissions. Nobody has walked past a dissolving sculpture yet.