Responsive Ecologies, an artwork in collaboration with the Zoo Society of London (ZSL), Musion Academy, and fellow artist collective captincaptin (Jonathan Hall and Gareth Goodison), is a public installation environment that questions our understanding of nature and our role in the disturbing shift in many ecologies due to the effects of climate change. It was installed at Waterman’s Art Center in London, UK in 2010 and features green screened slow moving animals as captured from the ZSL taken out of their environment and digitally placed into the CAVE of the show.
The nature of interaction with the immersive exhibition means that a visitor to the space immediately becomes part of the environment. When attempting to perceive any of the animals portrayed within the space, the visitor reshapes the installation in real-time by causing slices of scan lines to disperse and intersect with other parts of other animals, challenging viewers to consider their roles in the shaping of ecosystems and as co-habitants of an environment shared by a host of other species. It highlights the dynamism of the numerous networks we exist within and reveals how our behavior is reactive and deterministic to a complex system of cause and effect.
Technical Development of Installation
Source footage for the project was generated using custom-installed greenscreens in various environments within the London Zoo. Mital and his collaborators were afforded the immense pleasure and opportunity of capturing high definition video of the zoo’s diverse animal population in their “natural” environments.
The installation was in the form of a 360 degrees multi-screened projection or CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). Visitors to the exhibition would enter the CAVE through a passageway leading from the gallery entrance. All four sides of the CAVE were back projected with each side connecting to form a large continuous projection. The presence of people within the space would be tracked and used to deconstruct and interlace the video in response to their movement.
Mital developed the custom overhead motion capture tracking systems using OpenCV and openFrameworks generating blob detection, ultimately resulting in the interactivity within the projected space.
Additional Links:
Link to full exhibition write up
Collaborators:
captincaptin, Zoo Society of London (ZSL), Musion Academy