Biophillic Experiences - Final Project Proposal

An Urban Worms Experience

Take people on a multisensory journey that allows them to relate to the experience of a common earthworm searching for nutrients despite facing displacement and a changing landscape.

An Audio/Visual representation of experiencing the worm's journey as they respond to their surroundings. Layered with dispersed scents as another mode of storytelling. The scents will be the guiding input informing this worm's internal purpose.

I like 360 or cylinder projection because it invites the audience to sit together. I see this experience using a full room.

The idea behind abstract visuals is to help the human understand what the worm might be feeling in its body in response to light, rather than depicting a POV of the worm from a human understanding of sight. I still plan to use a virtual camera to help convey motion. The audio accompanies this to add to the emotion trying to be translated from the worm to humans.

The experience starts at a worm's space of origin in the soil. The scents dispersed then are to contextualize the worms' familiar scents/tastes. As the worms experience displacement the aromas in the space will become unclear, until they are in a noisier space filled with an increased amount of olfactory data to process, along with . With their purpose of being to find nutrients, they move through space

Concepts Explored:

Displacement

This project represents the displacement that many non-human species go through due to the act of artificial human intervention with nature. Seeing the human actor as invasive from this perspective. As an urban worm, it gives space for humans to speculate how other humans in urban spaces can relate to the feeling of displacement.

Organic vs Artificial

The relationship between internal need for organic matter in a world of artificial nutrients. Even in an artificial environment worms will search for nutrients. In trash and landfills it is difficult but they will take what they are given process

Story Stages:

• In the ground in ideal dark moist space (initial scent of nutrients)

• Shock of light

• Journey of displacement (scent path is disturbed)

• Search for nutrients in new space of noise and waste ( increased heart rate)

Research Questions:

How do worms respond to light? Do they respond to different colored lights?.

Earthworm photoreceptors can detect the intensity of different colored lights. Earthworms move away from white or blue light, but they do not react to red light.

What chemical nutrients are worms drawn to and where might they find that in trash?

Ideas to think about?

Something that kept coming up for me is that the urban worm has a story with several parallels to African diasporic experiences and several immigrant communities. How if at all to make that connection with this story?

Thinking about adding a 3D animation of what’s going on from outside the worms perspective, playing on an iPad at the same time.