ORACLE
>This project consists of a single particle of dust.
Oracle is meant to manifest itself as a two-layered reality: one physical and one virtual complementing each other.
Layer 1: Physical Land
Every year, winds blow large amounts of sand from the Sahara desert all the way to the Amazon. This flying matter serves as an important nutrient to the rainforest. According to NASA, these are 27.7 million tons of dust which wind carries across the Atlantic Ocean connecting the Earth’s largest desert to its largest rainforest*. The Amazon’s ecological viability is strongly dependent on this dust journey, which affects all the lifeforms inhabiting it.
This flying ecology may remind us of Earth’s atmosphere as a meaningful territory in its own right, and not just as an ‘air wrap’ or an ‘air highway’.
For Oracle, a particle of the Sahara desert will be taken from actual Amazon soil. One land will be found within another.
With scientific support, the dust signatures from the Amazon soil can be isolated and analysed, and the source place of the particles can be identified.
For the exhibition display, the dust particle will be shown within a 50x50x50 cm vacuum chamber preserving the integrity of the particle away from the museum dust. Considering that an average dust particle measures 0,0005 cm it will be near invisible to the visitors eyes.
With overwhelming quietness, this sole element will be presented at the center of the assigned exhibition space with no other (physical) additions.
Layer 2: Virtual Land
Besides existing as a physical reality, Oracle is also developed as a virtual entity — a high-resolution 3d rendering of the particle provided by a scanning electron microscope (SEM). This entity will be seamlessly integrated within the exhibition space; in this way, the dust particle, which is physically present but invisible to the eye, becomes accessible as a virtual experience with its own artistic dimension adding up new possibilities for viewership, for critical engagement.
This virtual layer has a visual and an audio component, which the public can decide to experience either together (as an audiovisual experience) or independently (either audio or visual).
This virtual layer is easily accessible to the public by simply using their phones; anyone pointing their phone camera towards the exhibition space will witness the dust particle in their own camera screen, embedded in the actual exhibition space, responsive in real-time, along with an audioguide (which again, you can activate from your own phone and listen via your own headphones/earbuds) that will tell stories related to the dust particle (its three constitutive ecologies: the Sahara, Earth’s atmosphere, and the Amazon).
> Visual experience
In contrast to the quiet approach of the physical element, the virtual dust particle will be a heavily upscaled AR intervention (Augmented Reality) and will occupy most of the exhibition space (for spatial reference, the particle’s spherical circumference will measure the same as the entire distance between the floor and the ceiling of the room).
The surface of this gigantic dust particle, therefore, can be explored in detail, remaining consistently embedded in the actual exhibition space, in real-time, so that the public can walk around its epic presence. In this way, literally, a particle is being turned into a whole world.
> Audio experience
This is an audioguide for this virtual land that has been born from a physical dust particle. The audio is meant to have two integrated channels: a soundtrack and a voice over. The soundtrack will be a generative algorithmic piece shaped by the actual ‘geography’ of the scanned dust particle. This ever-changing composition is about to begin its development, and the ‘voice over’, which is telling stories about the actual physical particle, is currently being created at the Davis Center for Artificial Intelligence –where I hold a visiting fellow position– integrating two neural networks (a text generator and a voice generator) under the guidance of Prof. Amanda Stent.
Summary
While the physical dust particle can be understood as an invisible bridge between distant ecologies, its amplified virtual representation can be understood as a visible bridge between our physical reality and the virtual realities that are also part of Earth’s ecology. I am especially intrigued by the careful and precise presentation of such a humble element – the dust particle –, and by how this tiny presence can trigger other approximations, other kinds of closeness, towards the planet that we inhabit, the planet that we are.
Finally, it may be meaningful to mention that Oracle emerges from previous works of Studio Antimundo, such as How Rivers Think (2018), and the technological aspects of the project are grounded on capabilities that have been built at the studio during the last three years, which have involved extensive experimentation with 3D imaging, AI image generating, and coding at large, as can be seen in the work The Andean Information Age (2021).
