Plant The Seed
End-to-end hardware and software solution for a site-specific interactive art installation – a community-based interactive virtual garden, where visitors can plant a virtual seed and watch their gardening efforts flower into reality. Festival Attendees were invited to trigger the animations by planting a heritage seed in one of five interactive planter boxes. Each box, when activated, would grow a virtual vegetable, turning the area into an inner city community garden.
Created for Art in the Dark 2012 through a collaboration with video artists Marcel Allen and Renee Warner for the Cargo Collective. We were asked to return to AUT for a repeat performance in 2013, at White Night: Best of Art in the Dark (part of the Auckland Arts Festival).
This project aimed to encourage people to think about and get involved in communal food gardens and to re-envisage public green spaces as not just somewhere to walk, exercise or have a picnic but also as a potentially fertile place to grow food.
Plant the Seed is on Facebook.
The Actionscript 3.0 video compositing application controlled the playback of up to six layers of HD video (with alpha channels) on top of a custom background image. The animated videos were then triggered using custom pressure sensors (underneath soil containers) and a MakeyMakey USB controller.
