This weekend I hosted a sleepover hackathon at my apartment as hurricane Irene swept over New York City.

Scott, Bryan, and I participated in the Node.js Knockout, a 48-hour global competition to produce something cool with Node.js. Node.js is an up-and-coming web server which is particularly good at handling real-time interactivity. For example it’s very easy to make a web-based chat room or multiplayer game using Node.js.

Inspired by Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, we decided to make a collaborative environment for exploring the collective unconscious. We spent a few days before the competition and Friday night discussing how best to do this in a way that we could accomplish in 48 hours. We settled on a collaboratively edited web of images.

On Friday night we play-tested using Google Docs to make sure the concept would work.

Worried that we’d lose power by Sunday morning, we worked extra hard all day Saturday. This pushed us to finish a working prototype by Saturday night.

But with Irene causing us little disruption, we were able to play-test and further polish the site all day Sunday. We were pushing features right up until the deadline at 8pm EST but it wasn’t as much of a last-minute scramble as these hackathons usually are.

Psyche is a web of serendipitously inter-related images reflecting participants’ whims. Participants collaboratively explore the collective unconscious, adding images and drawing relations, creating symbolic and aesthetic clusters.

Check it out! If you enjoy it, please vote for us in the competition.

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