Psithaura
The Dream
My friend Evan Tedlock approached me for his Animation Master’s Thesis with a wild idea.
He dreamed of an interactive installation using projection mapping and sound that could foster a transcendental, spiritual experience between people and nature. Inside of this ritualistic and playful space, an intimate group of 3-6 people could literally breath life to the installation, controlling the meditative audio-visual content of the space with their breathing.
What if you could feel a transcendental connection to the carbon cycle? What if you could be in a space that evolves and grows based on the rhythm and intention of your breathing?
The Inspiration
In the 1960’s, sculptor and art historian Jack Burnham began to follow innovations in cybernetics and systems theory. These observations led him to conceive of a new mode of aesthetic expression called systems art. In systems art, the emphasis is removed from an individual art object such as a sculpture or a painting. Instead, the holistic relationship between organic and inorganic systems is the art work.
A system, as defined by Burnham, is a series of relationships between material, energy, and information. According to Burnham, when we look at a painting, it’s not just the canvas, but the way we stand, the light’s reflection from canvas material onto our eyes, and our proximity to the painting and other viewers that constitute our aesthetic experience with the piece. In this way, we’re no longer seeing art as a stable, finished object. It’s a dynamic series of events that is always in motion, its a series of potential events that are brought to life, or animated by the audience.
USC Games Alumni Jenova Chen had created a game called Flower. Chen calls this game his team’s video game version of a poem. The player is inhabits the dream of a flower. They control a flower petal floating through a meadow using a Sony PS3 six-axis controller. This game places the player in the subjectivity of a flower, aligning people with nature through input. This inspired our interaction paradigm for the centerpiece of the installation to link players to plants in an intimate feedback loop.
The Vision
Beginning with the concept of the carbon cycle ("they breathe out / we breathe in") we believed breathing into the trees would not only be a novel interaction paradigm, but also one metaphorically consistent with the themes of interdependence between society and nature.
Although they bring the trees to life with their breathing, they also can overwhelm the space if they breath too often, forcing the audience to reflect on how much to breathe, how much to engage in a technological relationship with the natural, and how often to stop and contemplate.
The Execution
Each of the three pods controls different visual elements, their own discrete LEDs, and specific scored sound effects. The highest pod effects image distortion like twisting, turbulence, and noise. The middle pod generates the emanating rings. The lowest pod controls the various rotation effects. Additionally, when the viewers breathe together, these effects are amplified.
