Circles of Care

An Interactive Immersive Installation

Overview

Circles of Care is a multimedia immersive installation that explores the subject of care and how acts of care can be transformative forces in our environment. In this experience, participants interact with the installation through touch. By gently caressing a metallic ball at the center of the installation, participants work together to activate and transform colorful animations that illuminate their surroundings. At its core, Circles of Care simulates the life cycle of a living system and explores the idea that taking care of a living system, whether it is a creature, garden, or another person, provides order to the lives of caregivers.

Process

One of our main challenges was to create an experience in which, in a limited time span, participants could develop a relationship of caretaking with the installation. From the beginning, it was clear to us that the most direct interface of care we could use is our sense of touch. That’s how we came to the idea of triggering the visual and sound elements of the piece through hand gestures and touch.

At the base of the image making process was the idea of a “living organism.” It was important to find a visual language both abstract and organic that could represent a growing and developing being. To achieve such effect, we went with a procedural approach using analog under-the-camera animation with inks, oils, alcohols, etc. combined with digital image editing and re-timing. This process resulted in animation that felt familiar and strange at the same time, evoking the characteristics of a living system, without pointing to any specific living organism.

In the installation itself, the animation is triggered in a layered way by hand gestures. The amount of impact a participant has in the development of the visuals depends on the “stage of the life” of the piece. At the beginning of its life cycle, touch is critical to make the organism grow and develop. However, as the piece advances, the actions of the participants are less and less influential on the development of the animation and eventually has no effect when we inevitably arrive at the death of the system. During this process, participants stand between two projections of the system, inhabiting a space they created with their own touch. They control how the piece progresses, symbolizing how our actions have a direct effect on the environment we live in.

Production for this piece started in August 2018 and was completed in May 2019.