Messages In Bottles
A trans-media piece
Roles:
Project Manager, Unity Developer, Sound Designer, Web Developer, Visual Artist
Built with:
Unity, Firebase, Geospatial API, Ableton Live,
Hydrophones,
Contact
Mics, HTML,
CSS, JS, Touch
Designer, Visual Crossing API
Messages In Bottles is a creative and speculative trans-media piece in collaboration with the cultural cinema, Watershed, that was inspired by an ancient communication technology - the message in a bottle. This is a lunar month-long experience of short networked audio narratives, weather-linked visual installations with a final communal Augmented Reality happening.
We forged new ground within the AR space, combining the Geospatial API to augment the Bristol Harbourside with the cloud service, Firebase. Participants were able to type and send a message into their own bottle while also seeing other participants messages travel within the space, all in real-time.
Above is a visualisation of how the website would change over the period of a lunar month, further pushing our narrative of non-human species and cycles. Website pages with each specific podcast were created to host the audio. Sound design for the podcasts were created using hydrophones (water in cups and sinks) and contact microphones (trees and grass).
Listen to each audio episode here : We Are Gull, You Look Good For Your Age and Templar.
Using a weather API from Visual Crossing.com, the data was fed into touch designer to be displayed as text and also as a link to its visuals. Red being over 60 degrees, blue being less than 60 and orange being less than 30 degress. The next stage for this installtion would be to use projection mapping onto specific areas in the Watershed, to show the visualisation before each movie or to position 3-4 different TV screens around the site to show the different locations.