NOW THAT I’M HERE
Augmented reality can be a way to discover worlds unseen. The medium offers a way to layer meaning onto the world as we know it. We can enter into a deeper experience of the everyday. Now That I’m Here places narrative symbols into a digital experience, revealing a stranger’s psychological space for the audience to see. Each panel exists separately but hangs together, suspended out of time. A story unfolds over years: the left panel signals an era of possibility and potential. By the right panel, only a tall and vicarious stone tower remains. The centre panel shows us one level further in. Full of primal and essential feelings and instincts, what’s found at the core is immutable. Afterward, we take this encounter with us into our larger community, where countless internal landscapes await discovery.
Artist statement
In the technological age, we assume our identities as digital consumers with a mix of delight and fear. Accustomed to being mined for data, we’ve become both the commodity and the client. Beyond the identities this age imposes, other realities are still found in us. Augmented reality can be a way to discover these worlds unseen. The medium offers a way to layer meaning and experiences onto the world as we know it. We can enter into a deeper experience of the everyday.
Here, we are witness to a stranger’s inner world that reveals itself to us for a moment and then vanishes. In placing narrative symbols into a digital experience, it becomes a psychological space for the audience to observe. Each panel exists separately but hangs together, suspended out of time. A story unfolds over years: the left panel signals an era of possibility and potential. By the right panel, only a tall and vicarious stone tower remains. Difficult to scale, but filled with the scent of roses. Change is constant. But the contradiction of life is that only some parts of us experience the passage of time. The centre panel shows us one level further in. Full of primal and essential feelings and instincts, what’s found at the core is immutable.
Like the memory of a friend you once knew, we can’t help but take our thoughts of the stranger away with us after this encounter. In a small way they live on in the larger community, that vast human network where countless internal landscapes await discovery.
Assets: Unity, Blender, Gnaural, Unsplash (backgrounds)
Notes on Creation
Early in the process, I prototyped the portal effect in Unity using shader masks. I wanted to use a mechanism that created the feeling of accessing a place that holds more than what you can see.
I modelled the assets using Blender. Customized assets were the most useful to telling a unique story with its own look and feel. My goal was to create scenes with distinctive objects that seemed like they shouldn’t exist in the same place, but somehow fit together in this particular space.
The ambient noise was made using an open-source binaural beats generator called Gnaural. I wanted the sound to command focus but feel organic at the same time. Hopefully it puts the viewer in the right frame of mind to be curious about the details in the panels.
