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FESTIVAL OF LIGHT / DIGITAL URBAN FOREST, BARKING, UK
FOUR SEASONS
Createmosphere brought the outdoors inside with their Digital Urban Forest, part of the Barking Illuminations at 2011’s Molten Festival.
The Molton Festival returned at the end of 2011 to usher in December with eight days of street art and performances set around the East London borough of Barking. As part of the event, a series of illuminations were organised to bring a touch of colour and intrigue to the lengthening winter nights. London-based design studio Createmosphere responded to a call for submissions with a selection of suggestions. Of the three ideas proposed, the festival organisers selected the team’s Urban Digital Forest concept - a scheme to convert a vacant unit on Barking’s Town Square into an ever-evolving indoor forest scene. Createmosphere’s projects often involve working outdoors, sometimes using trees and other natural elements as structural backdrops for light and video projection. With Digital Urban Forest the team inverted this norm, bringing the natural world - and a grateful Createmosphere team – indoors during the unpredictable winter weather. The logistics of the project meant it wasn’t possible to allow the public free access to the space so the unit, with its floor-to- ceiling glass walls, became like a fish-tank with spectators looking in. A carpet of leaves covered the space, and a copse of stylised trees constructed from joists and
translucent screens took the place of pillars. A gradually changing program of coloured washes and computer generated video was then projected onto the scene to evoke the natural cycle of the four seasons. Barking Town Square already hosts an impressive arboretum, tastefully illuminated by Targetti spots and Tom Dixon pendants (mondo*arc issue 53), and the digital forest acted as a beguiling counterpoint to this. Spectators looking in became caught up in the interplay between the projected trompe l’oeil inside and the reflections of the real trees in the square. To make it more engaging for passers by, elements were introduced that could respond to movement in the street. One of the trees in the piece, a stylised branchwork of electric-blue lines, flickered on and off when prompted by a motion sensor set in the window. At the other end of the room, another sensor turned on a fan that caused a ‘flowerbed’ of balloons to shiver. Speakers around the space introduced recorded forest noises, interspersed with the amplified sounds of water running through the utility ducts of the building, further blending together the urban and natural worlds.
www.creatmosphere.com
Top The vacant unit on Barking Town Square was converted into a forest scene. Digitally generated content projected on to walls and transluscent screens evoked the slow change from spring through to winter while a giant sun glowed from within. (Photography: Frank Allias)
Above The balloon ‘flowerbed’ and electric-blue tree could be triggered from the street outside using motion sensors. (Photography: Dina Karklina)
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