This web toy lets you imagine what Dr. Frankenstein would've done with the internet

Want to play with a “delightfully grotesque web-toy?”

Get your mind out of the gutter, I’m talking about frankenSim.

frankenSim (subtitled “Tools for the Postmodern Prometheus,” for all you Mary Shelley fans) is an interactive animation made by Milo Targett at Animade, an animation and design studio in London.

The toy lets you play with a browser-based homunculus. After starting by guiding a tiny sperm towards a file folder, you’re greeted by a desktop that’s reminiscent of the Apple II.

You can open various windows, each of which contain body parts. There’s a brain, a heart, two eyes, a mouth (and its constituent parts), a nose, and a “comb”, which ends up referring to some lice-ridden hair. You can also apply filters to your view, like “Myopia” and “X-ray.”

I don’t want to give too much away, since a lot of the fun is in discovering the odd effects of moving the different parts around and seeing what re-sizing or clicking on them does (hint: expand the pop-up window the brain is in).

This particular toy has been lurking online since last month. Its look is based on another (non-interactive) animation called Lido Sim that Animade created earlier this year. The new toy, though, is supposed to be “a musing on how Frankenstein might have experimented with modern web tools.”

I’m not sure the good doctor would’ve been so into javascript. But hey, if this is what we get out of it, sure, sounds fun.

Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]