Theme
Play and Place
Context
“in the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - our houses.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
(https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/79216.Alan_Weisman)
Alan Weisman, the author of the book The World Without us talks about how nature would take over if one day the humans are ceased to exist in this vast world. The architecture would be dominated by nature, the composite structures would start to erode, the vegetation will form a sort of bonding with the artificial structures and blend in.
Considering the current situation of Coronavirus outbreak, people are advised to stay home by the government to slow the spread of the virus. Although, these are quite challenging times for the entire human race.
From last few weeks, I am struggling to arrange a time to get rid of the extra vines that are grown in our backyard. And, now they have grown quite larger, almost spread over our exterior walls.
I wonder if they continued to grow and protrude inside my bedroom, there are two large windows so they could easily break-in, how would it look like in the future?
Method
Create a virtual bedroom scene, depicting this idea of ‘nature taking over’, in 3d with the use of 3ds Max and Vray render engine.
Response
As I was re-creating the bedroom in 3d, I could easily scale the space and bring-in the accurate measurements from the real-world. I started with basic tools such as polygonal modelling, extrude, shell, Boolean, in 3ds Max. Rendered with Vray, very basic materials as there wasn’t much going on in the scene. Edited the image in Photoshop, inserted the deer, played with lighting in order to add more drama into the scene.
The power of 3ds Max is its flexibility to utilise third-party plugins. I got my hands on this plugin called Ivy Generator by Thomas Luft (http://ivy-generator.com/). It is a very user-friendly and useful plugin to create easy and fast ivy in your 3d scene.
I tweaked basic parameters like length of the ivy, thickness, density etc. I simulated the ivy around the window and it slowly grew inside the bedroom. It took a bit of playing around with the parameters but eventually ended up with something that I had in mind initially.
Reflection
I gave myself only a few hours to work on this exercise because I wanted to test myself whether I can play with this concept in the given time. It not only made me focus more on the theme but also made me realise that time is an important element to play/experiment, that pushes the artist to think outside box.
This exercise aims to visualise a virtual environment based on research done by author Alan Weisman who travelled over 24 countries, explored places where nature was dominating on human structures, interviewed people.
I came up with something like this for my practice of Play and Place because of the shutdown, that everyone needs to stay in their home. Wildlife is taking over the urban environment (Nature Resets Itself, derived from YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuG99gEPHow). I am basically experimenting with the idea of play in this exercise, playing with the concept of ‘nature taking over’ and combining it with a place.
There are many works in the field that elaborate on this idea of ‘nature taking over’. One such game I was inspired by, is, The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013).
