Biomer Skelters ("biome" + "helter-skelter") is a crowd sourced public artwork that connects body rhythms to potential ecosystems as it repaints a cityscape with prolific virtual flora. As participants walk the streets, a simple wearable biosensing system, employs their heart rate to plant and populate their path with fantastic augmented reality vegetation. The interior energy of the body, always at the edge of conscious control, is the generator of this wild growth wake, forming "helter-skelter" ecosystems that begin to overwhelm a city. A unique relationship transpires, linking the visceral to the virtual. Mind-body states cause network instantiation, just as what is created in locative AR space becomes, in some sense, manifested in the real space. The fields and forests of vegetation left behind, trace the participants changing psychosomatic conditions and transform the cityscape as medium. Biomer Skelters also has a competitive dimension. Participants choose between flora of two contrasting biomes, those that are local or "native" to the location or those that are "foreign" or "exotic" to the area. Thus, the city becomes the contested site of notions related to conservation verses possible climate transition. An ecological "game" emerges, visible on the streets through mobile devices and topographically from above, on Google Maps based "mARp." Biomer Skelters is a project originally developed for the city of Liverpool, UK, through a research initiative commission for the artist AR collective, Manifest.AR in 2011-13 and the "Turning FACT Inside Out" exhibition in the summer of 2013 at FACT, The Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in the UK. The software development was supported by a Verizon Thinkfinity Grant at Pace Universit and the heart rate sytem in a collaboration with the Physiologcal Computing Department of collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University. In its first iteration, the work developed around Liverpool's rich botanical history. Exotic species were drawn in AR courtesy of William Roscoe's World Museum Liverpool botanical print collection. A second current iteration was created for the Virtuale Biennial at two sites in Switzerland and a third for ISEA 2014 in Dubai. In each case the virtual plants and issues involved where varied to include the local fauna. |
FACT, Liverpool, UK, visualization |
iPad screenshot - Rolex Learning Center, EPFL, Lausanne, CH |
iPad screenshots - Burj Kalifa, Dubai, raised plant beds from circle walk |