In late 2023, we presented the immersive installation Atavic Forest, crafted in collaboration with Jonathan Uliel Saldanha at the Mucho Flow Festival in Guimarães. This sound-reactive journey invited visitors to wander through a landscape deeply rooted in our collective memory of forests, a vision brought to life by Artificial Intelligence. The forest, imagined by AI, whispered ancient memories and secrets, offering a glimpse into the bond shared by our ancestors with nature—a bond coded in our very DNA, yet stripped of any unnecessary detail.
Atavic Forest stood as a testament to the deep, unspoken knowledge that resides within us, presenting a space where these primal memories could be explored without words, in a direct, unmediated encounter with the otherness of nature. The journey embarks on a land that, while alien, feels oddly familiar, inviting to wander in the beauty of the unknown, each step revealing a new facet of this artificial yet eerily familiar world.
The installation explored synesthesia between the generated visuals and the accompanying soundscapes. The sounds, grounded in human emotion and interpretation, guided visitors across infinite psychological landscapes, each one resonating with the deep-seated memories of our relationship with the natural world. We wove together these soundscapes directly with the generative process, linked through our sonic vibrational perturbation paradigm, where we perturbed the layers of the generative networks itself with the sound.
Contributing Lunar Ring Members: Alexander Loktyushin, Gonçalo Guimar, Niklas Fricke, Zachary Mainen, Johannes Stelzer, Anna Taphorn