Delhi Tourism (Government of Delhi), recently organised a Winter Carnival at the Garden of Five Senses, New Delhi.
Artillume, in collaboration with Delhi Tourism, decided to increase the excitement surrounding this season by using technology to celebrate it. For the uninitiated, Artillumeis a venture which promotes and celebrates the growth of experimental new media arts, both as a discipline and a profession.
Artillume designed and built a huge interactive Tree and showcased it in the carnival. The tree, a design-centric architectural marvel in its own right, was an imposing 20-feet tall sensor-based structure. It had multiple kinds of pixel-controlled and programmable lights (DMX-controlled lighting synced with music). Besides, it was surrounded by pressure-sensitive podiums, which, when stepped on by at least 2 people together would trigger the tree into a frenzy of celebration through light and sound. The tree glowed with soft illuminations, and its Star lit up to culminate in a display of more than 100 different mesmerising colorful designs. The festival was a unique visual experience and the tree, a brilliant selfie spot for everyone present, right from the festival attendees to the onlookers.
Being a large public place, the Garden of Five Senses was the perfect location as it allowed Artillume to reiterate and communicate its faith in the “potential of art and public spaces in reviving and expressing a collective spirit of togetherness”. In the contemporary digital world, defined by e-ecstasy and e-exclusivity, where everything is e-enabled, we can feel like tiny specs and digits, lost in the anonymity of our singular atomised spaces. Hence, only the public places, where all differences die, can serve to rekindle the extinguished community-based collective spirit. Moreover, since this festival celebrated togetherness and collective experiences by cutting across all demographics and age-differentials, the unique experiential tree made it possible.
