Slow Walker

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Inspiration

Inspired by Timothy Morton’s ideas about Hyperobjects, which are concepts so vast that our senses can no longer encompass them, such as AI, climate change, the global economy, and the Internet, we aim to create small and comprehensible units, both tangible and fragile installations, that reflect or ironically summarize the hopelessness of trying to understand, embrace, or interpret the world around us.

What it does

The Slow Walker project turns the analog world inside out and makes it reborn in the digital one. In this experience, a microscopic tardigrade is placed as a gigantic object, made visually present in augmented reality (AR). Everything the audience needs is a smartphone and a pair of headphones. The creature measures about 100 meters in length and moves extremely slowly, grazing and interacting with the audience as they come closer. The digital artwork is accompanied by a soundtrack by the secretive electronica artist Abul Mogard and a voice over, providing an extra dimension to the highly social sculpture.

How we built it

The project is built using Unity with Google Geospatial API and AR Core / AR Kit. The creature is sculpted using 3DCoat, and then rigged and animated in Blender. The voice over is created using AI in ElevenLabs. The VO and sound design is played back spatially in Unity, which results in a binaural soundscape, in real time depending on where the user and the creature is located. The binaural sound mix adds to the animals presence in the AR experience.

What's next for Slow Walker

The project premiered at The Otherworldly Festival in Uppsala, Sweden in October 2023. This was a pilot for potential future collaborations between institutions, private technology partners, and the non-profits for a new form of large-scale digitally generated public art. The artwork aims to showcase the development possibilities that exist with idea-based art and new technology, a hybridized form that combines AR, text, and music in a staging of urban space. The Slow Walker project will be further developed and launched again in the summer of 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden in a collaboration with The Stockholm Technology Museum. We are also in the process of setting up Slow Walker in Montreal, Canada and Copenhagen, Denmark for the spring/summer 24.