Showcasing Interactive Installations
Umwelt
Umwelt refers to the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world. As humans learn more, we begin to see that different species live in interconnected communities sustained by symbiotic relationships that support survival. They communicate and adapt through sound, touch, chemistry, and scent, while humans, who lean heavily on sight, often ignore these networks and our impact on them. Noise, air, and soil pollution disrupt not only our own health but also the species we rely on, from butterflies that pollinate to bats that balance insect populations.
Umwelt is an art and research project that will translate these nonhuman ways of sensing into four interactive artworks presented in a free public installation. Each piece will offer a data-driven perspective on a species we cohabit with. By collaborating with ecologists, sound engineers, and fabricators, I will use environmental data, and field research to drive the visuals. Because humans are highly visual, each work converts sensory data into moving images so we can see and interpret these other umwelten in our way.
Each artwork will be displayed on its own vertical monitor with a custom frame, giving the screens a presence closer to painting than to hardware. Arranged as a small collection within the space, the four works will invite visitors to move from one species to the next between different worlds, with sensors, sound, and, in some cases, scent or touch interfaces integrated near each screen.
The project focuses on four species whose primary modes of navigation are not visual: the big brown bat, raccoon, eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly, and American black bear.
All Concept images and videos are AI produced based of detailed prompts of my visual workflow, although providing a glimpse into the project they do not fully capture the detail of the work that will be created.
The bat work will translate acoustic recordings of echolocation and surrounding urban soundscapes into a shifting visual field, with echo delays, call density, and frequency changes driving movement, brightness, and pattern while human-made sounds appear as abstract noise that dulls and distorts the bat’s acoustic world.
Hearing – Big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus)
Nocturnal insect-eater found all over the Southeast. It builds a 3D map of space using echolocation. Emits high-frequency calls and listens to the returning echoes. Tiny differences in echo timing and frequency tell it how far away, how big, and how fast an object is moving. Neurons in its midbrain are tuned to specific echo delays, so certain cells fire only for objects at particular distances, like an acoustic depth map. By changing call rate, intensity, and beam direction as it closes in on prey, it “zooms in” sonically the way we focus our eyes. For a big brown bat over a Georgia river, “space” is a shifting cloud of echoes rather than darkness.
Touch – Raccoon (Procyon lotor)
Common in forests, wetlands, suburbs and city edges everywhere in the Southeast. The front paws are ridiculously sensitive; a huge portion of the raccoon’s sensory cortex is devoted to the hands. They process detail in texture, shape, and movement similar to how we process visual detail. The skin on the pads softens when wet, exposing more receptors. That “washing” behavior is really an upgrade to tactile resolution, especially when feeling around under water or in mud. At night, along a creek or in a dumpster, they are basically feeling their environment as their main channel: finding food, identifying objects, and navigating by micro-textures. For a raccoon in Tennessee, reality is a stream of tactile events moving through those hands.
The raccoon work will center on touch, using texture and material samples from creek beds, understory, and urban edges connected to a Playtron MIDI controller so that visitors’ contact with these surfaces drives a particle system of a guassian splat of the forest. With an intent to evoke the raccoon’s tactile map of its surroundings.
The eastern tiger swallowtail work will focus on taste and chemosensation, I will build a visual system rendering a meadow as gradients. Through audience participation they will be able to choose a "flavor" parameter based off chemical signatures from host plants and nectar sources to power shifts in color, structure, and motion.
Taste / Chemosensation – Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus)
State butterfly of Georgia, widespread across the eastern US. Has chemosensory receptors on its feet and proboscis. When a female lands on a leaf, she “taps” with her forelegs and literally tastes plant chemicals through her tarsi to decide if it is a suitable host for eggs. Receptors are tuned to specific compounds found in host trees like tulip poplar and wild cherry, letting her distinguish nursery-quality plants from everything else in the forest. On flowers, she evaluates nectar composition (sugars, amino acids) by taste while perched there, making a fast decision about whether this bloom is “worth” the energy. For an eastern tiger swallowtail in the Carolinas, a meadow is a mosaic of chemical signatures that she reads with every landing.
Smell – American black bear (Ursus americanus)
Black bears are native to the Appalachians and forested parts of the Southeast, including north GA, TN, and the Carolinas. The surface area of smell tissue (nasal mucosa) in a black bear is about 100 times larger than ours, and their overall smelling ability is estimated to be thousands of times better than humans. Their olfactory bulb (the brain region for smell) is huge relative to their brain size, meaning an enormous amount of processing is dedicated to odor. They can detect food from miles away and discriminate between many subtle odor blends: different nut crops, carcasses in different stages of decay, human foods, individual animals, and reproductive / stress scents. Allowing them to “read” wind currents the way we read visual perspective, moving cross-wind to lock onto gradients and then following the strongest odor line toward the source. In the Smokies or north Georgia mountains, a black bear experiences the forest as overlapping clouds of smell: mast crops, campsites, dens, other bears, all mapped long before they come into view.
The American black bear work will focus on smell. Odor-related data, wind patterns, and vegetation mapping from the Appalachian foothills will shape layered “scent cloud” visuals whose color, opacity, and drift correspond to changing odor concentrations and wind direction, with a selectable “human interference” setting overlaying chaotic visual noise to demonstrate how our actions disrupt that olfactory map.
