Group Members

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Cody Kellen

Cody Kellen began his design work in fabrication, and expanded into scenic design and integrated media design. His work in the theater emphasis of the Digital Culture program enabled him to develop skills in the Adobe Suite, using Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and Lightroom. As he delved further into scenic design, he gained experience in modeling and drafting programs, primarily AutoCAD. Beyond digital skills, he has developed his physical modeling skills in both full scale and small scale fabrication to better communicate and develop design work. His current focus is in scenic design and mixed media installation.

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Rose Doris

Rose started her design work in school theatre projects and productions. Her initial focus was mainly in sound design and engineering, using software programs such as Logic to create and mix sound effects in addition to hardware like sound mixing boards. She also aided in the design and fabrication of set pieces and elements. This spark in design for the arts led her to her chosen major Digital Culture. Through her studies at ASU within the Digital Culture program, she developed skills in animation, graphic design, 3D design, textiles, physical fabrication, and sound design. Her digital tool kit includes the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, using software programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Aftereffects to create visual media. Her current focused area of skills are in digital media design, which were used to create the visual aspects of this project, including animations, graphics, and project brand identity.

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Jordan Argano

Jordan's love for design was cultivated at a young age, as her parents are designers themselves, specifically architecture and interior designers. It was not until high school that Jordan found a passion for digital design and mixed media. She started in filmmaking and video editing during high school and quickly became familiar with Adobe softwares like Photoshop and Premier Pro. During her time at Arizona State, she focused her studies on mixed media and website design and development. Her digital tool kit includes coding in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and (some) SwiftUI, as well as, the Adobe Creative Cloud Suites such as Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premier Pro and InDesign. Specifically for this project, Jordan collaborates closely with Rose on the digital design aspects and aesthetics.

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Dan Rosen

Dan’s interest in media arts began his freshman year, when he started to learn how to produce music. He was enrolled in the popular music program at ASU, but decided it wasn’t for him, and switched to the Digital Culture program. Since switching to Arts, Media, and Engineering, Dan has spent a lot of time with two programs in particular: Max/MSP and VCV Rack. For the purposes of this project, Dan has focused his energy and efforts on the technical side, as well as the sound design.

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Dennis Williams

Dennis’s collegiate path started at South Mountain Community College, where he completed an Associate of Business degree. But after completing the degree, he shifted his focus to design and animations, beginning at ASU with a Digital Culture (GIT) degree. This is where he honed his skill in the Adobe suite and gained an understanding of the Autodesk suite. He also pursued website development and design through HTML and CSS and tried various other coding languages, including Swift, C# and javascript.

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Introduction

Chrononaut Canyon is an interactive art installation that shows our audience how presence in an environment changes the space itself. The medium we will display this through is by digitally imitating a natural environment: a desert rock canyon. Through a combination of software (Max/MSP, VCV Rack, Adobe) and hardware (Xbox Kinect, Projector, physical materials) we created an interactive projector wall: one in which the audience’s movements and presence in front of the projection directly impact the visuals being displayed. We intend to highlight how simply being in a physical space changes the quality of the environment, as well as highlighting how the more trafficked and populated an environment is, the more it changes. This is to reflect how highly trafficked ecological tourism attractions, such as National Parks, experience degradation from increased tourism traffic and poor visitation practices, in addition to the effects of the global climate crisis such as air pollution, higher temperatures, and excess waste.

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Digital

Digital media design, including visual communication, computation, and programing, has emerged as a new solution to global problems that expand further than just the digital world. Digital design approaches, which for the purpose of this argument are artistic endeavors, associate art as a communication tool to create and inspire solutions to global issues, such as climate change. The use of an artistic digital medium creates a sensory experience for both the designer/maker and the audience/user that communicates the meaning of an artistic gesture. An ‘artistic gesture’ for our purposes falls appropriately in our context of inspiring change in the issue of climate change, under this description by Hans Dieleman: “A way for the artist to engage his/her inner self in the creation process, which is also considered as a condition in creating the required change of paradigm toward sustainable innovation and climate change mitigation”[2]. We chose the creation of interactive projection as a sensory experience that would immerse the audience visually, sonically, and kinesthetically so that our message could be received in an engaging way. We also chose our particular digital medium of an interactive projection screen because it was environmentally sustainable in accordance with our mission, as it would not produce material waste, which engaged us personally as designers.

 

In order to realize our interactive digital art installation, we researched other interactive and immersive art installations that utilized digital design along with physical fabrication aspects. Our biggest artistic design precedent is from the interactive and immersive art installation company Meow Wolf, who use digital media (such as sound, lighting, and video) and digital fabrication techniques in collaboration with physical fabrication to create an aesthetic immersive experience that engages the user on multiple sensory levels. While Meow Wolf’s installation works are more abstract in meaning and aesthetics than our project, they still yield the visual stimulation to inspire its users to consider a deeper message behind an interactive artistic experience. We were inspired by their psychedelic and “trippy” aesthetics because they have proven to be highly successful in engaging their audience, as their installations have attracted over 2.7 million visitors in multiple locations country-wide [1]. This inspired us to create digital media for our projection visuals under this psychedelic aesthetic precedence in order to be more successful in engagement, whilst also maintaining an environmental message. This can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2, which show photographic examples of the creative aesthetic of Meow Wolf’s installations from which we found design inspiration.

 

Design, in the digital form, is proven to yield the power to aid in situations of emergency and offer solutions to global problems, such as climate change. For example, designers Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn used digital design methods to create solutions in aiding the COVID-19 pandemic. Through their project “Design Emergency”, which started as an Instagram Live series that served as a recovery focused response and became an idea bank for designers to contribute design related problem solving [3], they exemplified the success of digital design practices in creating solutions to global crises. Some of the designs involved in this project included digitally downloaded PPE patterns and innovations in the production of ventilators, all of which were technological developments that aided in the COVID-19 pandemic. This project exemplifies how design (in particular, design in the digital medium) can serve as a powerful tool for change in times of crisis. According to Rawsthorn, “design is a matter of shaping things and outcomes but in larger ways than we might have imagined; it is a way of seeing and engaging with the world, and of tackling problems as wide-ranging as climate change, dysfunctional social care systems, social injustice and, it turns out, global public health emergencies.” [3]. The digital, including social media and media arts like photography, video, and sound, provide innovative tools and mediums of design to create solutions.

 

Now that digital design practices, specifically those of an artistic and creative nature, have been established as valid additions to finding solutions to global problems, we can justify our use of digital media in the realized form of an interactive art installation to engage with the problem of climate change. Specifically, the digital design aspects of our project include animations, photography, sound, projections, and lighting that in their content communicate a message addressing the destruction of natural environments due to ecological tourism. We used design software such as Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, to create visuals such as the pristine canyon environment, represented in a photo seen in Figure 3, and animations of graffiti, smog, and warped abstract unnatural colors that represent the destruction of this ‘untouched’ environment, seen in Figure 4. We also used digital 3D design software, such as Rhino and AutoCAD, to design the physically fabricated structural elements of our installation, such as a “rock” seen in Figure 11, that acts as both a visual cue to the aesthetic environment and a vessel to house the XBox Kinect and other pieces of hardware. These digital aspects were then further organized into a visual programming language, Max/MSP, in order to create an interactive and sensory immersive multi-digital media design. Through Max/MSP, we created a robust ‘patch’ that responds to human input, measured through an XBox Kinect. Screenshots of these visual code patches have been included in this document in Figure 6. We used Max/MSP to layer animations that would respond to data recorded by the XBox Kinect in order to reveal different designs (animations and soundscapes) that correspond with different aesthetic messages (the destruction of an environment based on human interaction). The XBox Kinect is used as hardware that collects infrared sensor data to be read by Max/ MSP, changing the projections shown on the screen. The Kinect is housed in front of the projection screen in a physically fabricated “canyon rock”, seen in Figure 9. The Kinect tracks the movement of bodies in the space in front of the projection screen (the audience) and for how long they stay in the space for. This data is sent to the Max patch and parsed, interpreted, modified, and used to produce different projections based on the amount of bodies in the space, as well as the length of time that bodies stay in the space. If the audience stays in the space for an extended period of time, another projection with a corresponding audio aspect is revealed. The first projection that requires zero audience interaction illustrates a pristine canyon environment with a calm and natural audio environment, seemingly untouched by human influence. As the audience enters the space and interacts in the environment, the second projection is revealed in their shadow (Figure 4), showing an environment that is polluted visually and audibly by human influence. As the audience spends more time in the space, the third projection is revealed, which warps and changes hues to represent degradation in a psychedelic aesthetic (Figure 5).This can be seen in photos (Figures 7&8) from a preliminary demo before our official presentation during the Digital Culture Capstone Showcase on April 28th, 2023. All these digital aspects realize our interactive projection wall environment, and through the sensory content of the media relates our cultural message.

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Contribution

Our project hopes to contribute to the conversation around climate change and climate conservation. Our intention for our audience is that they interact with the digital environment that we have designed to lead them to the understanding that simply their presence within the space has the power to change said environment depending on their choices. This is to reflect how in a real natural environment, such as a National Park or preserve, their presence and choices in that space have the power to either conserve or degrade the environment. Using interactivity via a digital medium, we hope that our audience feels engaged with our installation enough to receive the message. We hope to offer an immersive experience that is both aesthetically pleasing and thought provoking. We also hope that our audience will learn that ecotourism has the capability to cause inadvertent harm to the environment and that the audience will use this information to reevaluate their practices whilst visiting natural spaces.

 

We also hope to add to the body of artistic work, specifically in the digital realm, surrounding issues of climate change, as our small-scale local effort contributes to a portion of the conversation that is needed to incite individual and collective action. On a grander scheme, we hope to offer the idea that art and design has a place in finding solutions to complex global issues, such as climate change. We also hope to highlight the interaction between the digital and the cultural, and how our digital culture has the power to create solutions to our cultural problems outside the digital realm.

 

Our strengths for this project occur in our ability to create a visual representation of the issue of environmental pollution and waste from ecotourism (animations) that is not only aesthetically stimulating, but able to be interacted with by the user. The level of interactivity that we have designed in this piece via the digital means of animation and programming creates a new level of engagement for the audience that we hope creates a greater understanding of the message that we are trying to communicate.

The weaknesses of this project include the capacity for technological malfunctions and errors that could cause the project to fail. We have experienced some issues with our programming software, Max/MSP, and its connection to the XBox Kinect that have caused our animation layers to not project and respond to the audience in the way that we intended. There were connectivity issues between the Kinect and the computer running the whole system that took about 3 weeks to resolve. Eventually, the issue was resolved, but it set us back in terms of fine-tuning the technical dimensions of the project. But due to the nature of software and hardware, there is a possibility for technological issues that would cause the installation to not run properly. However, we do feel confident that the problems have been solved and on the date of presentation, everything will run smoothly.

A next iteration of this project could include new levels of immersive interactivity and new levels of visual immersion with the addition of physically fabricated pieces that would add to the visual identity of the canyon. In a further iteration, walls could be built that would mimic the walls of a canyon that the audience would walk through to experience the interactive projections. This would also include further digital aspects, such as the inclusion of a second projector and Kinect so that both walls would be interactive and create a more immersive experience.

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Speculation

Chrononaut Canyon could extend into the future with further modifications to both its digital and physical fabrication aspects that would expand its levels of intractability and impact on its audience. It could also be extended to reach different geographical audiences by being modified for different natural environments. For example, the visual environment it is representing could be changed depending on the audience and location. The environment that is being visually represented could change to a forest or beach environment to relate to the setting that the art installation is being presented in. If the art installation was being presented in California, the digital visuals and fabrication could change to represent the environments of Yosemite National Park or Joshua Tree National Park in order to create an individual and relatable experience on the specific audience of that area. This projection wall installation could also be used as an education tool on pollution and conservation in the context of ecological tourism. For instance, the installation could be implemented into the National Park Service’s conservation education and be housed near National Parks or places that experience a high volume of ecological tourism. This would add to the exposure of the intended audience and make its impact more successful as the audience would be exposed to its message in a relevant context.

As climate change continues to be an issue in our global future for many generations, it is imperative that creative solutions are designed in order to continue sustainable innovation. As shown in our installation project and other interactive pieces of art, the digital creative medium has the power to design these solutions and inspire change through communication. It is Chrononaut Canyon’s goal to show the audience of the Digital Culture Capstone how digital media can yield the opportunities to communicate complex cultural problems in creative ways that can inspire change through sensory and emotional connections.