Wild Web

An interactive installation reflecting on our consumption of digital content feeding artificial ecosystems

Time to complete: 6 weeks, Fall of 2023

My Role: Engineer – Physical Computing, Fabrication

Team: An Engineer and a Visual Designer

Tools used: Microcontrollers, MAX/MSP, Hydra

Installation space: NYU 370 Jay Street

Time to complete:

My Role: 

Team:

Tools used:

Installation space:

6 weeks,  Fall of 2023

Engineer – Physical Computing, Fabrication

An Engineer and a Visual Designer

Microcontrollers, MAX/MSP, Hydra

NYU 370 Jay Street

Social media has altered our behaviors by shortening attention spans and creating this demand for generating creative works that serve as a universal language for us. We envisioned this phenomenon in the digital world as having the potential to fuel artificial life. Modern AI generative tools which have stirred such outrage in recent days can exist due to the vast amount of accessible content on the web. So just as moss, weeds, and wild plant life find a way to grow and sustain a foothold in the most unpredictable places, we decided to capture natural phenomena and make them “come to life” through the digital footprints people live behind as they interact within social media. 

Ideation - Card Sorting and Roundtable Discussion

This piece was the culmination of me and my teammate Fugue Xue’s passion for creating an immersive interactive experience using our respective skills in physical computing and live coded visuals. To select a theme we followed a card sorting technique that allowed us to play with words which reflected our interests. We came up with descriptors and enablers for the themes and jumbled up the latter two cards to land on weird ideas. 

Themes with Descriptors and Enablers
Random enabler and descriptor cards to come up with 4 stories

We then voted on which ones we both favored and had four ideas to present to peers at a roundtable discussion. The discussions were focused on critiquing the interactive elements of the installation, what aligns with the story and which one would be most intriguing to experience.

Peer reviews yielded insights such as, SynthNature lacking a message and a motive to live, which we can provide from the concept of WayOut. It is a perfect metaphor of nature being effected by humans, but here we envision the interactions in our project to be translated from social media activities and our online existence to create a surreal interpretation of nature.

Designing the Key Interactive Elements

There were some parts of this project we realized were crucial:

  1. An easily recognizable natural element – tree, flower, grass, etc.
  2. Generating content like a social media post
  3. Interactions that involved manipulating the natural elements
  4. Sounds of nature and technology mixed in a way that goes with the interactions

 

We decided on representing the aspect of social media with a projection of a digital screen as it displays a post in a platform such as Instagram, with an animated visual and caption. The reactive physical elements takes the form of mechatronic flowers that will glow and bloom based on liking or disliking the post.

The space we were working with
Initial sketches for the Installation

Finalizing the space for the installation directed our design a lot. The space resided between a glass corridor with a projection screen and an ultra short throw projector mounted to the ceiling. Which provided us with a new set of possibilities and challenges. 

The Visuals

We went an extra mile to get inspiration by attending the LIVE! CODE! Workshop at CMU in Fall 23. We incorporated Hydra visuals coded at the workshop in the social media posts to project surreal nature effects that react in real-time to the viewer. We patched these visuals within Max/MSP to appear prompted by the Like and Dislike buttons that the audience can react with. The caption texts were also generated for each interaction by a poetry AI generator plugin in Max.

The Physical Computing Elements

The first step in creating the flowers was to provide a mechanical structure for animating the flower. I built a wire base to mimic opening and closing the flower. The base was then attached to servo motors programmed to rotate 0 to 180 degrees for every button press.

Next we needed to construct the petals in a way that was lightweight, held its own structure, and had light effects. The petals were made of dark organza since it is lightweight, easy to weave fiber optics into, and highlights the colors within the fiber optics.

The flowers were mounted to servos and positioned on boards that would later be installed on the walls.

After connecting all the servos to the buttons, we tested out the movement of the flowers. Then we rerouted the Arduino serial communication through Max so that the buttons simultaneously trigger the change of digital content and the servos.

 

A more detailed documentation can be found here >> link

Testing in the Space

Assembling and Finishing Touches

Since we mounted all the flowers to large pieces of foamcore board, we used command strips to place the entire arrangement easily (no need to destroy any part of our hard work thankfully). The wiring was designed to simplify the assembly process so the only thing left for us was to create the scene with black fabric all around.

Audience Interaction and Final words

The most rewarding part of this whole process was not only seeing our vision come to life but the way people responded to the piece. What really completed the piece was the sound. We combined nature sounds with noises we associate with technology interaction such as mouse clicks and notification tones. And the button controls also had a sad and happy sound feedback that the  audience really enjoyed.

 

Some interesting observations we had:

 

  • “I feel like I could just sit here and watch there is a calming and soothing effect”

 

  • Many people were able to link digital content, artificial life and machine to the interaction as well as it being a commentary to nature.

 

  • Viewers wanted to map the buttons to the flowers and keep trying to find new surprises in the interactive experience. One such surprise was the camera and how some of the visuals reacted to the viewers.
https://github.com/musharrat37/WildWeb/tree/main

All associated files to this project can be found here