NON-DIMENSIONAL CITIES 2022
'Non-dimensional Cities' is an immersive cinematic experience in which participants journey through an endlessly unfolding virtual cityscape that expands over all axes. This dimensionless cityscape is constructed from a large collection of point clouds and sounds. While the user is standing on the controller platform and navigates through this virtual world, a sense of physical instability takes over.
Just like in the previous work 'Lost Dimensions' the building blocks of the virtual world are generated with custom C# Unity scripts from depth map information and panoramic photographs obtained from Google Street View’s API. Depending on the user’s position in the virtual world these blocks are dynamically repositioned on a three-dimensional grid. By subtle manipulation of motion and sound, perspective distortion Non Dimensional Cities re-calibrates the viewer's perception of dimensionality.
The origin of the point clouds is not directly visible in the imagery but their raw, glitchy, both realistic and abstract appearance makes them pre-eminently suitable to create a subjective audiovisual representation of our non-dimensional world.
The appearance of the interface is inspired by the procedural way the point-clouds are generated and spatially positioned in the 3D world. The users interact with their position on a platform in front of the screens. Shifting the body left, right moves the virtual camera accordingly. Moving forward on the platform makes the camera dive down, moving backward makes the camera move up.
Just like the 3D world, the accompanying soundscape evolves with the position and velocity of the user in the virtual world. The composition develops from a large collection of sounds that are spatially distributed and dynamically mixed by the spatial audio sound mixer SPASM. This custom made Max for Live device processes spatial audio mixes in real-time and allows the repetitive, ever-changing reiteration of the generated visual world to instantly shape the compositional structure for the soundscape.
Artist:
Marnix de Nijs
Sound design:
Boris Debackere, Brussels, BE
Unity development:
Pawel Homenko, Plewiska, PL
Spasm for Live, spatial audio mixer:
V2_Lab, Rotterdam, NL
Sebastian Frish, AT
Courtesy:
.NewArt { foundation;} ES