A collaborative artwork that aims to raise awareness for climate emergency

Origin

The Lost Passage was a collaborative project that came out of an online fellowship program called BeFantastic Together in 2021. The fellowship program, which I was part of, explores the on-going climate emergency with projects using with Art & Technology.

The core idea of this project, cited from the project page:

“The Lost Passage” is a digitally reconstructed environment of a swarm of artificial passenger pigeons, which went extinct in the early 20th century. In this digital space, they inhabit a never-ending, sublime, yet destitute memory of a lost landscape. However, on closer inspection, they are actually confined within the four walls of this space.

Together with a New-Media Artist from USA, a cultural producer and a mentor from Singapore, we drafted the idea and each contributed to this project.

Contribution

With a background in Animal Science & Bionics/Biomimetics, I volunteered working on the flocking behavior of the pigeons.

Initial implementation

First, I followed a Cinder tutorial and demonstrated the team how the swarm could look like. I just love the organic look and feel of the swarm. Notice also how it disperses from the imaginary red, triangular predators!

Improvements

With the help of Amay Kataria, we ported and adapted the behavior implementation from C++ to Three.js. Since the pigeon is supposed to be trapped in the virtual box, I edited the behavior model to make them “boundary-aware”. Finally, after adding the 3D pigeon model to the virtual world, the flock looked even more realistic than before.

Final thoughts

Switching from the C++ world to JavaScript the very first time was challenging yet fun experience. As the time given for the implementation was limited, the interactive web experience is only available on non-mobile devices. You can give it a try here.