Liminoid Garden* was part of the SKYLINE 2014 festival, a 10 day long free event featuring 10 interactive installations at different sites in Downtown Los Angeles.
The Garden* - an interactive machine interface between the environment, the city and its users - responded to real-time environmental data from the city, giving awareness to the audience while simultaneously making him/her part of the behavior.
The project featured a collaboration between Filipa Valente [limiLAB] and Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre, who performed and interacted with the artificial blooms exploring the interaction between machine, environment and the city.
The liminoid space of the urbanscape is where we create new cultural expressions and relationships with our surroundings. The Garden* - an interactive machine interface between the environment, the city and its users - responded to real-time environmental data from the city, giving awareness to the audience while simultaneously making him/her part of the behavior.
Set in the context of Downtown Los Angeles, a bouquet of artificial ecology mechanisms communicate between the penthouse of the Cooper Design building and the city at large. The mechanical blooms are equipped with electronic controllers that receive readings of light, temperature and pollution from the exterior and reinterpret these into physical movements and light fluctuations. The pieces then reflect a kind of breathing behavior that is altered by the actions of audience members - creating a play space between conditions of the outside and inside.
The interaction between machine, environment and people was explored by the Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre in a series of programmed short performances that occured periodically in the Garden*.
