Pandemonium
(Please use headset for the video)
ONE LINER:
Our oblivious sonic footprint can cause acoustic trauma or even death to underwater life.
WHAT IS IT:
It is an anti-interaction interactive art piece aimed at raising people’s awareness of noise pollution towards under marine animals.
“We now know that the underwater world is anything but silent. In fact, today’s researchers are concerned that underwater noise produced by humans is distracting, confusing – and even killing – aquatic animals.”
Based on prior and current researches, noise pollution caused by human activities in the ocean (underwater explosion, ship or boat sound, construction, etc.) can and does severely disrupt whales’ behaviors such as their communication and their ability to find food, mates or avoid predators, thus threatening their lives or even directly causing death. Therefore, we decided to use the microphone as the primary input and interaction in this project to simulate how underwater acoustic trauma is produced by humans and how it is largely affecting marine species which would be whales in this case.
HOW IT WORKS:
When the sound made by the user from the microphone input hits a certain level:
The background color will change from black to a bloody red as the choppiness of the ocean will be influenced by the volume of the noise. The whale will be disturbed heavily and thus lose their track of peaceful and orderly swimming orbit, which too will be affected by the volume of the noise. Also at the same time, in order to create a more immersive experience, the underwater whale sound will be played from the headset that user is wearing. And news/statistics will be shown in the form of text surrounding the whale. The design of the whole piece (ocean surrounding whale in a circle) gives a feeling of aquarium as well as peaking “what’s beneath” from a telescope, which is always used when something is hard to see from a distance.
When the environment calms down again, fortunately yet ironically everything will go back to the serene environment that the piece starts with, while in reality, most of the time the trauma caused would take decades to ease and heal and the tragedies of death are irreversible.
WHY WE MADE IT:
Due to global warming, there are more and more open sea area in Arctic, which leads to gas/oil exploration, potential tourism, as well as commercial shipping. All of these are making very loud noise for the underwater world, as if pulling these creatures from a quiet countryside to the middle of the city during rush hour.
We believe every species deserve the right to live on this planet equally. Therefore this project acts as an educational and warning piece to every single one of us even though we might think that we are not doing anything bad.
These ocean threats, however, are also human threats.
As Cousteau said, “For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.”
CODE：
Github link: https://github.com/RuyiC002/PANDEMONIUM/tree/master/PANDEMONIUM
(the whale is mainly in testWhale.js, the ocean is mainly in waves-master 2/index.html)
Atom (Javascript, three.js, WEBGL, p5js), Xcode, Syphoner, MadMapper, Premiere
#NYU Tisch IMA Creative Computing 2018
#ITP/IMA Winter Show
Reference:
https://threejs.org/docs/index.html#manual/en/introduction/Creating-a-scene
https://github.com/josdirksen/learning-threejs
https://github.com/nicolaspe/everyday_windows
https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_shaders_ocean2
https://editor.p5js.org/Stoker/sketches/ryconk1JE
https://threejs.org/docs/#api/en/extras/curves/CatmullRomCurve3