What is the concept of the forest and where did this come from? 

Before the forest

The concept began a while back when Tom Didiot-Cook presented his work on the Tonnetz music-interaction device in one of the Swarm lunches. The interaction device designated note groups on a hexagonal grid in which the performer would press buttons and it would create some harmonious sound. This peaked my interest as I’d always wanted to try my hand at making some musical device, and the hexagonal patterning of notes was fascinating.

Then In 2022 when visiting the ICRA 2022 conference in Japan, I had the opportunity of visiting the TeamLabs Planets exhibition in Tokyo - and it was amazing, I really could not recommend it enough. The Teamlabs is an interactive art exhibit with numerous all-sensory installations. This include an ankle deep pool with projections of roaming fish with swelling music, a room of hundreds of synchronised dangling LEDs, a room with a giant ceiling projection and rousing music to loose yourself into and many more. This entire experience ignited my interest in developing an audio-visual installation inspired by what we had seen.

An opportunity to try and develop a concept came with the Computer Science Societies Art Hackathon where I convinced Suet to work with me to build upon the Tonnetz concept into something human scale and bigger! In this concept, the floor of a large dome would be comprised of hexagonal pressure pads, building up the tonnetz structure. The pressure pads represent a choice of note, and the interaction of multiple participants could create chords which would be broadcast through the space. We wanted to include a visual element complementing the sonic element by analysing the emergent notes and chords, and projecting a colour-scape onto the dome above.

Designing The Forest

In early April 2023, after the hackathon, Suet and I approached Tom and somehow easily managed to convince him to join our project - building an audiovisual interactive art exhibit. Starting from the hackathon idea, we quickly started brainstorming alternative approaches which might actually be constructable. Ranging from walls with tonnetz on them, placing pre created “chord” blocks, to random moving hexagon tiles, some sort of growth mechanic and others - each including some element of interaction, sound/music generation and emergence. 

After going round and round a bit, we returned to the dome idea and developed the hexagonal floor into a set of pillars - with users interacting with tall poles instead of simply standing. Each pillar could have its own speakers and interaction mechanisms - buttons, dynamo cranks and the like. The pillars could then interact with some voting system or whatnot (we never got this far but these are ideas to bring forward anyhow!).

It was also at this time that we started to reach out and look for potential opportunities to develop this installation for. An audience and target event would help guide the design, looks and usage of the system significantly. Tom and Suet had links to Mireia Bes-Garcia who organises the yearly Bristol Festival of Nature outreach event. We were a tad skeptical going into the initial meeting, but after presenting our concept, she ended up convincing us that our installation could actually work within this event! It was also at this point that we brought Georgios Tzoumas onto the team as he had also wanted to bring something to this festival - I swear this man knows everyone!

Towards the end of April, with all this in mind, we finally settled on an initial concept of pillars in which you could attach patches onto, where each patch triggered a sound to be played locally by that pillar. We also agreed that two pillars was probably the most we could put together (though we wouldn’t agree on the look and final design of the pillar until much later on!).

Finding Some Funding

After talking with Mireia, it became clear that we would need some funding to be able to deliver on our vision. Treating this project as a prototype helped as we only wanted small sums on the order of £500 to £1k. This made it easier to approach numerous internal university funding pools for outreach. This included the engineering faculty (SCEEM and CAME), amongst other possible internal funding pools. Unfortunately it seemed that a lot of the internal pools have been defunded. Fortuantely both the BRl (through FARSCOPE) and the Cabot insitute (thanks Georgios!) were kind enough to step up and offer funding.

Virtual Design

For the fun of it, we found one evening to do some virtual design on the look of each pillar. We used my Oculus Quest using Google Titlebrush for Suet and Henry to have a play around to see what they could come up with. The right image is a GIF showing both of them.

Pillar Design

We really liked the blocky/angular high rise style of the urban contrasted with the more flowy style of the nature pillar. So, after some back and forth we finally settled on a concept. Each pillar would be comprised of a number horizontal slices sparated by a gap. One pillar would be nature styled, using wood, and the other would be urban styled using plastics, metals and other materials. The nature pillar could have bamboo or willow around the outside. However we compromised on modular design where both pillars would be built around some aluminium extrusion where the slices could be slid on and off.

A challenging design element was the ability to take down the pillars for transport and disassembly/assembly. This was a conundrum with the nature pillar as we wanted to use the bamboo as an outer shell. In the end we went with dowel struts between each layer so that we could weave once the pillar was constructed.

I came up with the overall shape of the nature pillar using sculpting in Blender, and passed that onto Henry to convert into multiple slices. Tom augmented the slicing with 20cm spacing to include space for dowels so that it could be built in sections. Through lots of discussion between myself and Tom, we went with acrylic sheeting for the Urban pillar and a simple repetitive slice which could be continually rotated to change the topologies. Each slice would be connected to the next via vertical slats which could also house the speakers. We chose to go with the slices as it could be more easily lasercut, as opposed to molded, 3D printed or other method.

Building The Pillar

With designs in place, we go on to details of construction! 

Part 2 will explore our implementation decisions and some of the problem solving we had to endure!