Godot game engine, live microphone.
Drawing upon western religious motifs of the world’s creation (“fiat lux” being the Latin translation of “let there be light”), Fiat is an exploration of impact—of how we ourselves shape our world through word and breath. Inspired in large part by geophilosopher David Abram’s Becoming Animal (2011), Fiat encourages participants to reconnect with their animal bodies, experiment with making strange noises, and reflect on the forms generated in response, or “by fiat.” As Abram writes:
Oral language gusts through us—our sounded phrases borne by the same air that nourishes the cedars and swells the cumulus clouds … language’s primary gift is not to re-present the world around us, but to call ourselves into the vital presence of that world—and into deep and attentive presence with one another.
In this interactive audiovisual installation, participants are invited to make sounds into a centrally-located microphone. The peaks and valleys of those waveforms are then used to surface and shape islands emerging from a projected virtual ocean. How do our tendencies shift when such impact is made especially apparent? How do our modes of expression work to expand, contract, separate, unify? And how might we evolve our day-to-day output to better honour a living planet inviting us to return to right relationship?
Fiat was developed using the free and open source Godot game engine. As audio data from the microphone is received by the software, an FFT spectrum analysis is performed, its values printed to a row of pixels in an image texture. Using a GLSL shader, this texture is then applied as a displacement map for a fixed three-dimensional plane, giving the appearance of islands that are being ‘flown over’ as new rows of pixels are added. Visual textures are applied to the terrain based on height, creating a gradient between wet sand at the shorelines and mossy rock at higher altitudes. A golden glowing edge is seen as new terrain is generated, accentuating the mystical, godlike nature of the experience.
A lone seagull soars over the scene, shifting its path to the contours of the new terrain, reminding us that the worlds we create are not uninhabited, but shared among a rich web of kin both human and more-than.
