I was lucky enough to get involved with this great project recently. DynaFleur is an interactive installation by Douglas Story and Desdemona Enfield with Poid Mahovlich creating the wonderful landscape in which it sits.

DynaFleur is a huge sculptural object, featuring the vibrant photography of Douglas Story. It spans the entire Princeton South sim and has a series of different reactive spaces within it. These work with the open source reflexive architecture scripts the Keystone Bouchard developed. Desdemona really did some wonderful work with using them – as Keystone said it “raises the bar for reflexive architecture in SL”.

Here is a machinima video of the project by Kitty Lalonde :

Dyna Fleur from Kitty Lalonde on Vimeo.

As far as the sound and music went, I tried to work very closely with Doug to achieve the effect he desired. We both felt that the installation needed a sense of wonder and beauty, but with an uncertain motive – so it could be percieved as either “friendly” or potentially “menacing”.

One end of the sculpture is very technological and complex and acts in a way that is similar to technology imitating nature. The sound for this is mechanical and digital in nature – kind of like a technological cloud of sound. The other end of the installation is very organic. Here we discussed many common references and influences including the sound design in Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’. The result was a highly organic “squelch” achieved by me squishing ice cubes and processing them extensively.

Musically I really wanted to create something that had a sense of the delicate beauty of the flowers and the sculpture, but also to communicate how strange and almost dangerously enticing they are at such a large scale. The music also works directly with the installation sounds, throwing the seemingly non tuned sounds into a musical key.

I was really happy to be involved in this project, especially as its a way of developing the concepts of non linear sound tracks for the metaverse, which I am so keen to persue.

The installation opens tomorrow Sat the 5th Jan.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Princeton%20South/217/211/66

Full information on the project is available here at the project blog :

http://dynafleur.blogspot.com/