The artwork is my portrait of the decorator crabs that live on Wadawurrung country, off Victoria’s surfcoast. The crabs adorn their shells with weed, coral and reef to disguise themselves. Like the crabs, the artwork hides in camouflage, constantly generating new arrangements on the fly, with no two looks ever the same.
The gallery work is motion reactive, inviting viewers to go slow and earn the artwork’s trust, with slow movements spawning new arrangements, wheraeas more frequent movements keeps the work locked in its current state of hiding.
Exhibition handouts were augmentable, with viewers able to view the full generative artwork via the scan of a QR code. Allowing gallery visitors to essentially take the artwork home with them.
The gallery installation featured flora from the cliffs that overlook the rockpools where the decorator crab lives: Poa grass, Cushion Bush and Noon Flower.
The AR-enabled prints are each a unique, randomly generated arrangement spawned by the artwork itself, and when viewed via augmented reality offers a portal to the full, ever changing Fascinator artwork. With no two prints the same, all handsigned and numbered. Available at www.watchyourego.com/shop.
Fascinator brought together a diverse array of digital tools with artwork components sculpted within virtual reality with Adobe Medium, refined in Cinema4D, then textured in Substance Painter, before being loaded into Unity Game Engine, with a webcam sensor triggering interactivity in the gallery environment, and Vuforia triggering the augmentations in the AR version of the artwork.
