Sophie and I from Les Morphogénistes were contacted by Matthieu Noucher, researcher at Bordeaux Montaigne University's Passages laboratory. He proposed us to be commissionned for the creation of interactive installations in the framework of his ANR research project Spherographia : "from virtual globes to map blanks, a (carto-)graphic immersion into the storytelling of global change", with the only constraint of working on the project's research themes, and the objective of setting up an itinerant Art & Science exhibition. We chose to follow two main tracks : biodiversity and data deluge, which led us to develop two interactive digital artworks.
A poetic vision of the phantasmagoric beings living over the fringes of the known world's maps
We relied on a world map generated by Julie Pierson from an analysis of GBIF's (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) database to create Inframonde. The original map represents the density and the regularity of "occurrences", the actual measures sampled by scientists in the real world, timestamped and uploaded to the GBIF. A high quality print physical globe version of this map has been produced by Alain Sauter, one of the world's few artisanal globe manufacturers and member of the ANR project. With the help of Fabrice Dubertret, we could use the map's data as topographic data and have it interact with a large particle system to fill the map's blanks with crowd simulation algorithms.
One of the research project's components was to compile an inventory of all virtual globes accessible online. The project's Globothèque has now reached more than 300 entries thanks to the team's hard work plus a lot of voluntary students. We developed an alternative interface named Globeflux to navigate into the Globothèque, that is designed to make a sense out of the "data deluge" expression by overwhelming the spectators with a "globe deluge".
