This work focuses on a boat journey that continually floats back and forth along the coast. Interspersed throughout this virtual environment are monolithic and serene planes of sections from paintings. The shapes representing the coastline and geology of the Jurassic Coast were built with computing-efficient vertical planes onto which different types of image maps were applied. The juxtaposition of these planes allows viewers, as they pass through the landscape in real-time, to form two-dimensional compositions. This dichotomy between 3D and 2D provides a visual tension between dimensions, playing with the flatness of the projection screen and the illusion of three dimensions in the virtual world.
The weather system consists of changing waves, wind, rain and atmospheric perspective. The waves, wind and atmosphere are controlled from a live internet feed of meteorological measurements (including wave height, sea temperature, wind speed, air temperature). The use of this data (updated every ten minutes) provides another temporal element to the work. Additionally, the rain is an example of a programmed random event. This represents the unpredictable nature of weather in Dorset. The light changes when it rains in Light Years: Jurassic Coast, the scene becomes darker and the fog increases. Not only does the virtual landscape represent the countless millennia of the geology that created the actual coastline, the live and randomised weather represents the reminder of the processes that are constantly reshaping it, through erosion.
Synchronized outputs allow for very high-resolution content to be displayed seamlessly across the video wall. This was made possible by using narrow bezel video wall displays. Altogether 30 monitors were used delivering 5760 x 10800 total resolution for the audience.
Jeremy Gardiner
