Forest Daydream

Forest Daydream is a large scale (7m x 9m) interactive, immersive installation developed by Phoenix Perry, Federico Fasce, Ben Kelly, Robin Baumgarten, Matt Jarvis, Adelle Lin, at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London. It also includes participation from the students of the MSc in Creative Computing at UAL in 2020.

Forest Daydream creates a dynamic woodland atmosphere exploring the soundscape of the endangered ecology of an Amazonian rainforest. Participants interact with the forest. In the centre of the room, an illuminated, interactive geodesic dome harkens players inside. Around the hut, trees populate the world and are interactive interfaces for mini-games. Inspired by 1970's folk games, the play happens across the forest and requires cooperation with others to promote social wellbeing. These experiences are unbound in time and are played either in a focused way or through open-ended, free form play.

Players explore a physically reproduced videogame space joining efforts to play small games hidden in the landscape. Upon completing each mini-game, players can change the time of day and weather in the world. The soundscape mixes familiar game tones with field recordings from the Amazonas region of Peru, where the ancient community of the Wampís live; they preserve an ancient cultural obligation to maintain the forest in balance with all living things.

This work empowers through exploration and collaboration while raising awareness about the traces that we leave in the environment when we play. The music composition by Ben Kelly was recorded in collaboration with the Wompi in the Amazonian rainforest. Kelly's sound work raises awareness around globalisation's impacts on the Wompi's indigenous culture and their environment.

Kelly was the first person to record their songs and their forests' acoustic ecology. In contrast, this installation’s fabricated forest made from processed materials such as PVC pipe and plywood arouses an intrinsic appreciation of nature while reflexively examining the cost of everyday first world-building materials on the global south.

This beautiful, tragic hypocrisy of materiality offers a subtle meditation on our landscapes' conflicting forces at work. The collision and overlapping of these spaces provoke consideration. What ecologies are being lost and gained as technology impacts our ecosystem? Given the resources required by cloud-based massive multiplayer online games, this work softly poses urgent questions of how and where we play and at whose expense?