VIRTUAL BIOME
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2022- Work in Progress
Sensor-driven VR/XR Environment with AI-driven narrative, Simulation
An interactive virtual reality work that is a fully world-watchable ‘natural’ biome.
It connects the exhibition space and its navigation to data-driven lifeforms, flora and fauna via live data streams from online sources and physical sensors.
Viewer interaction in the exhibition space is an additional driver for animation and simulation in the virtual world. The work explores possibilities for world watching and crossovers with physical exhibition spaces and tests different interactions between viewers, physical and digital exhibition space, as well as AI.
The user will be invited to explore the biome while interacting with plants and animals in the digital environment, discovering its peculiarities and creating new relationships through the user-influenced content and the interplay with the data-driven elements.
The virtual biome encourages exploration, offers unique storytelling, allowing visitors to explore the biome’s hidden potential and learn more about their own relationship to the natural world and to the technology that enables and defines its connection to their experience.
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BURN (KAIO)
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2022
Interactive Installation, Virtual Reality environment and Live Video
exhibited as part of ‘Brave New Humanities’ at WIP Arts & Technology Festival, Nicosia, Cyprus and developed during a residency at CYENS Thinker Maker Space, Nicosia, Cyprus.
The VR environment and video in this exhibition were playing live on a cloud server and were streamed to the headset/display. Visually they combine a mixture of open-source assets and scans taken directly from the Mediterranean.
An ultrasonic distance sensor communicates wireless with both environments and changes parameters of speed, camera direction, particle intensity and sound, depending on the position of the viewer.
At the same time, live temperature data from Arakapas (an area in Cyprus where 55 square kilometers burnt in a wildfire in July 2021) controls the light intensity of the environment at any given time of day.
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BREATHING SPACES
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2021
Collaborative Video and VR environment with Ben McDonnell
exhibited as part of ‘Unfolding Terraces’ at Brunswick Centre, London, UK (2021).
Drawing on themes of temporary support, rhythm and instability, and the malleability of digital space, McDonnell and Nonnenmacher have created six variations of the Breathing Spaces theme. Each artwork constructs a relationship between sound and image, questioning how they play a part in bridging the gap between virtual and ‘IRL’ (In Real Life).
Variation 1 positions a scan of a rotating ‘Leslie’ speaker (a device that makes a unique swirling sound used originally by church and jazz organ players and later adopted by rock guitarists in the 1960s) in a virtual space, allowing the artists to play with the scan according to the variances in volume and pitch of the music.
The sound combines new and remixes of earlier compositions by Ben McDonnell. Recordings of breathing, Korean flute, violin, guitar and bass clarinet have been digitally reworked and focus on the shifting forms, breath and space already inherent in the work. Each work comprises over 120,000 individual points which make congruent forms that contract and expand over time or respond directly to sound in the work.
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