Spherographia
Digital art installations for the Spherographia ANR project
Our digital artists collective Les Morphogénistes was contacted in 2022 by Matthieu Noucher, researcher at the Passages laboratory of Bordeaux Montaigne University. 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", and to work as part of a collective of researchers, engineers and PhD students with the common objective of setting up an itinerant Art & Science exhibition. We chose to explore the biodiversity and data deluge themes, which led us to create two interactive digital artworks.
Inframonde
A poetic vision of the phantasmagoric beings living beyond the fringes of the known world's maps
This work is based on a world map generated by Julie Pierson from an analysis of the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) database. The original map represents the density and the regularity of "occurrences", the actual measures of the presence of biological species sampled by scientists in the real world, timestamped and uploaded to the GBIF. A high quality print physical globe version of this map was produced by Alain Sauter, one of the world's few handcrafted globe manufacturers and member of the ANR project. With the help of Fabrice Dubertret, postdoctoral researcher at Passages, we were able to use the map as topographic data (slope and exposition) and have it interact with a large real-time particle system using a custom crowd simulation algorithm.
Inframonde's imaginary inhabitants are wandering in the map's blanks at the surface of a minimalistic virtual earth globe. The result is displayed on a large screen, and a visual control interface running on a tablet allows visitors to rotate the globe in all directions.
Globeflux
One of the main tasks carried out by the research team since the beginning of the Spherographia project was to compile an inventory of all virtual globes accessible online. Spherographia's Globothèque has now grown up to reach more than 300 entries thanks to the team's hard work and with the help of many voluntary students. We created Globeflux as an alternative navigation interface for the Globothèque and designed it to give visitors a sense of the "data deluge" expression by overwhelming them with a "globe deluge".
The interface is projected on a wall. Visitors can interact with the installation by pointing their hands at the interface. The movements of the globes are sonified, they move in a chaotic way until someone starts interacting with them, in which case their global movement slows down to allow them to be pointed at more easily. Once a globe is pointed at long enough, it becomes selected : it grows to reach the screen's size and an information sheet is displayed next to it. When it is released, all the globes resturn to their chaotic behavior.
Exhibitions
- VOART Art exhibition center, Val d'Or (CA), in partnership with the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue - 11th of april to 1st of june 2025
- EVENTS TO COME : Musée d'Aquitaine, Geodock and Muséum d'Histoire naturelle (to be confirmed), Bordeaux, 15th of june to 15th of december 2026
