The Garden of Unearthly Delights is a five-channel, interactive physical/digital installation in which three, real-time simulated biomes evolve over the course of a day as users make ethical decisions that alter the paramaters of the virtual worlds.
The work is inspired by the paintings of Renaissance master Hieronymus Bosch, which depicted surreal worlds with mythological characters in order to explore the dynamics between the spiritual and the physical. Bosch’s masterpiece ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ is a triptych altarpiece depiecting Heaven, Earth and Hell according to Bosch’s visualisation of the moral characteristics of each sphere.
My work takes Bosch’s original and turns it into an interactive morality play in which user inputs create chaos, ecological harmony, or hedonistic effects within three evolving biomes. Each virtual world is controlled by artificial intelligence behaviours: characters explore, interact, hunt and fight; plants grow, flower and wither, all reacting dynamically to stimulus.
Audience behaviours influence the evolution of the worlds. Periodically, a narrator asks questions that prompt the audience to make decisions that reflect their attitudes towards the world. These questions will ask audiences to think carefully about issues such as climate change, social responsibility, future industries and culture all couched within a poetic narrative based upon medieval literature.
Users respond by selecting from a range of responses that cause the narrative to branch. Their selections are fed back into the virtual world, changing the way its characters and environments adapt. Each selection is mapped to a set of ethical variables, with corresponding algoithms that control environmental simulations.
The ‘health’ of the virtual world is charted on an onscreen data dashboard, providing real time statistics of the sentiments of the audience. In this way, the visual and simulative evolution of The Garden becomes a data visualisation of the behaviours of the audience.
Originally commissioned for The Outside festival, PWC The Difference 2023.
Exhibited at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2023, Sydney.
Project Director and Lead Artist: Andrew Yip
Immersive and Sound Design: Abram Powell
Writing and Narrative Design: Hannah Jenkins