I’ve collaborated with Gilad Ratman since 2006, serving as cinematographer on all four installations that form the basis of this project — The Multipillory, Swarm, Five Bands from Romania, and The 588 Project — as well as later works such as Drummerrsss. Over nearly two decades of working together, we’ve developed a shared language around image, movement, and atmosphere. Four Works grew naturally out of that relationship.
For each piece, Gilad wanted to create a distinct 3D terrain whose movement, texture, and lighting echo the tone and rhythm of the original work. Hovering above these landscapes are objects resembling archaeological findings - traces of past events scattered across the terrain, acting as gateways to video clips, audio fragments, photographs, and texts from the installations themselves.
The experience encourages viewers to explore the materials intuitively, uncovering echoes of a lost civilization as they move through the landscape. Encountering the work becomes a form of excavation - each object a fragment that reveals another layer of the story, discovered rather than presented. The result is a digital world that mirrors the spirit of Gilad’s installation environments: atmospheric, playful, and open to interpretation.
Building the Digital Worlds
The core challenge of Four Works was to create fully animated 3D terrains that could run smoothly in the browser while giving Gilad the same sense of control he has in the studio. Each world needed to feel expressive and atmospheric, not like a technical demo, and at the same time I wanted Gilad to be able to shape the landscapes himself - adjusting camera angles, fog, lighting, displacement, and the patterns that defined the terrain’s geometry.
Creating the Artist Sandbox
To make that possible, I built a real-time terrain editor in WebGL using Three.js, along with a simple interface that exposed the essential creative parameters of the landscape. With every change updating instantly, the tool became a kind of digital workbench: Gilad could raise the terrain, shift the light, reshape the fog, or rotate the camera until the world matched the tone he imagined. Once the atmosphere felt right, I extracted the underlying code and brought it into the Vue-based portfolio site.
What began as a development tool quickly became the heart of our collaboration. Instead of responding to fixed designs, Gilad sculpted the terrains directly - creating four distinct digital worlds that echoed the mood and logic of the installations themselves. The process blurred the boundary between artist and developer, allowing Gilad to engage with complex code-driven expressions in a way that felt intuitive, fluid, and completely his own.
Directing Digital Space
Four Works became a rare opportunity to merge two sides of my practice - cinematic world-building and code. Creating these terrains with Gilad made me realize that a 3D environment in the browser can be treated much like a set or location: a space for shaping atmosphere, movement, and rhythm. The project taught me how intuitive a coded world becomes once its underlying levers are exposed, and how powerful these tools can be for the creative process.
3D object modeling for the terrains by David Chaki.
Building the terrain editor gave me a new way of thinking about directing digital environments. By revealing the internal mechanics - light, fog, displacement, camera - I created a space where the world could be “directed” in real time, finding compositions and moods before committing anything to final code. This idea of a director’s sandbox later became the basis for other projects, including my newsroom work at Haaretz, where I applied the same approach to complex map-based interactive articles.
From Tool to Practice
Four Works crystallized how I think about digital space as something to be directed rather than engineered. By turning code into a tactile, responsive material, the project shifted my role from implementing predefined designs to shaping atmosphere, rhythm, and movement in dialogue with the artist. That approach — building tools that invite intuition, experimentation, and shared authorship — has since become central to my practice, informing everything from artistic collaborations to large-scale interactive journalism.