To Water A Dying Garden

"To Water A Dying Garden" is an immersive installation about nature, technology, and human influence, shown at MiZa and the Rizq Art Initiative's "In Good Company" in Abu Dhabi, and at NYU Tisch in New York. You lift a teapot and water a single plant, and a field of dissonant point clouds slowly resolves into a garden, but only while you keep watering. Stop, and it falls back into noise. The garden exists only as long as someone tends it. A second person can shine their phone flashlight on it as it grows, so it takes more than one kind of care to hold the thing together.

Technical Implementation

The project operates using photo-resistors, self-made switches, Arduino, and TouchDesigner. The first trigger is when the pot gets lifted up, a signal is sent to TouchDesigner spawning a new point cloud flower in the garden. This is done by a replicator system that instantiates a custom TouchDesigner component with random values (for color, size, position) that is linked to a new Geo node. Once you start watering the plant, the point-clouds start coming back together to form flowers by switching between two point cloud files. The photo-resistors are then mapped to the Bloom TOP, deciding the threshold of the glow depending on how much light the plant receives. The point clouds when dispersed are in constant noise based movement, along with the camera. Future implementations of this installation in a bigger room, would involve tracking camera and motion to the movements of the crowd.