Liminal Lands
Liminal Lands is an environmental multiplayer experience shared by four people at the same time. Each person transforms into the basic elements controlling life across the landscape: Algae, salt, water and mud. As they embark on a communal ritual experience, people morph and change throughout their journey, exploring each new world from a changed perspective of the landscape. Visitors move across different scales and global weather conditions, shedding their human perspective as they are pulled into six different realms inspired by the macro-landscape.

DARK ECOLOGY

IsoScope

IsoScope is a kinetic audiovisual outdoor installation, a sensorial experience in which the audience wanders through rotating lights and an ever-changing sonic cloud. This new work by Dutch artist Joris Strijbos consists of multiple robotic wind objects interacting with each other and with their surroundings. Strijbos aimed at creating a human-constructed phenomenon, an abstract entity which, like most natural phenomena, can only be experienced in certain weather conditions. IsoScope can be seen as a proposition for a new kind of machinic and artificial lifeform. IsoScope was commissioned by Sonic Acts for the second Dark Ecology Journey (2015) and realised in collaboration with Jeroen Molenaar, Daan Johan and Erfan Abdi.

Atmospheric Forest
Atmospheric Forest is a large scale VR point-cloud installation that visualizes and sonifies the relations between the forest and climate. It reveals the interaction patterns between the pine-tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient Swiss Alpine forest, and weather conditions in this valley, effected by drought. The trees do not only produce oxygen, but they are living bodies who breath too. I.e., they emit part of carbon dioxide, sometimes even up to 20 perc. from what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their lives back into the atmosphere. Atmospheric Forest explores the effects of drought on local forest ecosystems, and how such stress situations influence production of resin and volatile emissions (such as usual pine-tree scent).

peau d’ane
For Montreal-based designer Valerie Lamontagne, the spark of creativity can come from the most unlikely of sources. In the case of her climate-reactive dresses, Lamontagne found inspiration in “Peau d’Âne,” a French fairy tale that begins with a king’s vow to remarry only when he finds a woman who equals his late queen’s beauty and virtue. Pressed to find a new wife, he concludes that his daughter alone qualifies. (Quel scandale!) The princess delays the wedding by demanding impossible prenuptial gifts, including three dresses made from moonbeams, sunlight, and the sky. Lamontagne recreates these fantastic gowns but with a high-tech twist: Each dress reacts—in real time—to changing weather conditions.

Satellite Daylight
Satellite Daylight is an interactive light installation formed by a trapeze of 24 high-voltage neon tubes tapering upwards, created by fabric | ch – a studio for architecture, interaction and research dedicated to investigating contemporary space based in Lausanne. The installation is connected to data collected in real time from online weather stations and meteorological satellite maps, which therefore translate actual global light conditions picked up by satellites orbiting the earth at the latitude of Basel into an endless loop of perceivable electrical intensity.

Erratic Weather
Despite some world leaders skepticism, climate change is a reality and the world isn’t just warming, in some parts of the planet the weather is becoming more erratic. During the last years, our generation has started to observe the effects and consequences of this shift, witnessing violent and unexpected climate phenomenons. Erratic Weather is a digital art project aiming to represent changing atmospheric conditions into an immersive multimedia experience. During the performance, the system uses various source of weather information retrieved from an online database and processed on real time to generate a visual and a surround sound composition. During 30 minutes the audience will experience the life cycle of swirling phenomenons such typhoon, hurricane and tropical cyclone , demonstrating the devastating power of the nature and the emergency to preserve it.

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.