In a hopefully distant future in which nothing of what surrounds us remains, not even the elements, troves of data containing code and text about lost forms of turbulence are recovered and presented to the audience via video projections and headsets.

© Jan Schmitz

If things do keep falling apart, and I mean, properly apart, then how, I wonder, will our children’s children’s children know what it felt like when things were not apart? What would pictures mean to them, if they had never stood on a beach and felt the waves lap at their feet? What good would moving images be if these images only seem to reference themselves?

So we set out to capture the world not only as congealed moments in time, or of time, but also as sets of relations that could maybe some day be reactivated, in real time.

Excerpt from the XR experience

Ebbs, flows and other forms of turbulence are protagonists here. Peripheral movement phenomena such as clouds, waves, wind, fog and smoke play a crucial role in immersive art forms such as anime and video games. They are the vehicles that transport us into imaginary realms. Artists have come up with a plethora of ways of simulating them, drawing on, but also pushing forward, developments in technology and science. Though often rooted in scientific modeling, they care only about illusion, balancing precision and computing time, doing just enough to call forth familiar sensations in otherworldly spaces.

Grounded in science, engineering and somatics, both magical and deeply melancholic, simulations give insights not only into the way we conceptualize things, but also into how we perceive and feel them.

The work includes excerpts of the following beautiful works from ShaderToy, an online community and tool for creating and sharing shaders. Shaders are programs executed by the GPU, and which make use of its parallel processing capacity for real time graphics.

2D Clouds by drift

Very fast procedural ocean by afl_ext

Protean Clouds by nimitz

Clouds by Inigo Quilez

Further, the fluid particle system is inspired by the work of Sebastian Lague: Coding Adventure: Simulating Fluids and the ocean waves on Ocean FFT by gasgiant.