Projects
Future ecologies: exploring multisensory, extended reality landscapes
Future ecologies: exploring multisensory, extended reality landscapes
This project will explore the potential of creating multisensory digital landscapes that are designed to reveal the hidden – and sometimes mysterious – elements of natural ecosystems.
Researching and testing ways of merging extended reality and spatial audio technologies into their existing artworks.
Their artistic practice is highly experimental, blending science and visual arts to metamorphose natural landscapes and thereby draw awareness to the role that humans perform in driving environmental change (both positive and negative). My project aims to investigate hybrid, immersive techniques that can capture an audience’s imagination by opening dynamic multisensory portals into future ecologies.
They will use this funding to access vital training and equipment that will allow me to integrate striking visual effects into my evolving digital landscapes. Firstly, exploring the potential of using 3D animation, digital visual effects and motion graphics in order to merge abstract scientific imagery into real landscapes. Secondly, researching ways of creating immersive and interactive virtual reality environments where users could explore surreal landscapes and access additional content (e.g., microscope imagery and sound data). Thirdly, making field recordings of nonhuman sounds (e.g., water, plants and soils) and synthesising the MIDI data to create an environmental soundscape with a sense of space and distance. Digital art can be adapted to fit numerous scenarios and spaces thereby repeatedly engaging new audiences. It is this inherent mutability that they hope to embrace by incorporating more immersive digital elements into my creative practice.
Explore
£5,000
Aims of the Project
Merging more creative digital technologies into tactile photographic practice; effectively blending digital and physical spaces to unearth more-than-human worlds. This approach would allow the development of increasingly sophisticated, multidisciplinary artworks designed to promote sustainable digital futures.
In the short-term, I plan to learn about virtual reality landscapes and spatial soundscapes via a combination of stereoscopic image capture, field sound recording, MIDI data processing, computer software instruction and mixed reality experiences. Longer-term, I’m keen to use my expanding ‘immersive arts’ knowledge in numerous flexible ways. For example, by developing augmented reality, outdoor arts trails or by generating a haptic art installation that responds to real-time audience input.
Meet the artist
Elizabeth Woodger
Lead artist
she/her
I’m an interdisciplinary photographic artist based near Exmoor in Somerset. As a former geologist, my creative practice represents a form of environmental and ecological research; I investigate how landscapes have been shaped and how they respond to human influence. Fifteen years ago, I was researching past greenhouse climates as a potential analogue for future climate change. Since then, I’ve retrained as a visual artist, but my desire to communicate stories about the natural world remains unchanged. In essence, my creative practice aims to raise awareness of global environmental issues by metamorphosing the natural elements of my local landscape.
