About

Inspired by Timothy Morton’s ideas about Hyperobjects, which are concepts so vast that our senses can no longer encompass them, such as AI, climate change, the global economy, and the Internet, we aim to create small and comprehensible units, both tangible and fragile installations, that reflect or ironically summarize the hopelessness of trying to understand, embrace, or interpret the world around us.

The Slow Walker project turns the analog world inside out and makes it reborn in the digital one. In this experience, a microscopic tardigrade is placed as a gigantic object, made visually present in augmented reality (AR). Everything the audience needs is a smartphone and a pair of headphones. The creature measures about 100 meters in length and moves extremely slowly, grazing and interacting with the audience as they come closer. The digital artwork is accompanied by a soundtrack by the secretive electronica artist Abul Mogard and a voice over, providing an extra dimension to the highly social sculpture.

Technology

The project is built using Unity with Google Geospatial API and AR Core / AR Kit. The voice over is created using AI in ElevenLabs. The VO and sound design is played back spatially in Unity, which results in a binaural soundscape, in real time depending on where the user and the creature is located. The binaural sound mix adds to the animals presence in the AR experience.

Credit: Promenad, DVA, Peder Bjurman, Abul Mogard