Video of Bioactive installation, Achatina fulica snails, Augmented Reality technologies
“That Which Lives In Me is an installation that uses Augmented Reality technologies to enable dynamic rearrangement of real and virtual spaces. Drawing on the metaphor of a snail’s “shell house”, we have “augmented” real shells of Achatina fulica giant African snails with a certain analogue of “electronic aura”— an interactive layer of digital visual information. This information is output to the screen in real time, its appearance determined by behaviour of the snails: the dynamics of their movements inside the terrarium and the intensity of their inter-communication.
To create an alienating effect, we made use of the snails’ active nocturnal habits and arranged an additional transmission of the “electronic auras” with a 9-hour phase delay, thus separating the “auras” from the “real bodies” for a considerable period of time. In this particular visual experiment, we not only demonstrate the abilities of Augmented Reality to superimpose the real and the virtual in real time, but also to outline the boundaries of applicability for these technologies, liberating spectator perception from the mechanical rhythm of interactivity imposed by the life that surrounds us.”
-http://www.snails.ncca-kaliningrad.ru/eng-index.html
THAT WHICH LIVES IN ME is one of the latest projects by artist and curator Dmitry Bulatov, who works at the NCCA in Kalingrad, Russia. Among his other projects are Senses Alert, Biomediale and the film festival Evolution Haute Couture dedicated to documentation of artists working with artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, etc. The exhibition Soft Control, curator by Bulatov will open in Maribor, Slovenia in November.
