Squidsoup

Created by Anthony Rowe, Gareth Bushell, Chris Bennewith, Liam Birtles and Alexander Rishaug, Scapes conjures into being three-dimensional cities, landscapes and abstract architectures purely from sound, software and light. Chimaera-like visions of ephemeral spaces are created and destroyed in real-time. They occupy physical space, but only fleetingly. They leave nothing behind when they, and the sounds that spawned them, vanish.

Tuned software and specifically designed sounds are used to generate a series of abstract landscapes visualised on a bespoke room-sized 3-D grid of lights controlled in real-time. As the sounds are played through speakers and picked up with microphones, the visual process can be interacted with – intercepted, corrupted and altered by visitors making their own sounds to interfere with the original audiovisual designs.

The work is part of an ongoing series of explorations into the creative and immersive possibilities of light-based real-time visualisation in physical space. At the heart of the project is a room-sized 3-D grid of individually addressable points of light (Ocean of Light) that is controllable in real-time to simulate objects and movement in physical space. This custom hardware enables the creation of dynamic, interactive, three-dimensional sculptures from light. The resulting imagery has a presence, a location in physical space that allows the viewer to move around and experience the work from any angle.