Time-Sand is a responsive microcosm with its own space-time dynamics. Visitors are invited to manipulate a miniature landscape, altering the flows of water, light, and even time. Perturbations start waves that gush and bleed, revealing the past and slowing time in a manner like kicking up dust on the sea-floor or dripping ink on thick, porous paper.
The piece consists of an architectural model of a soil-remediation process (developed by Gregory Rubin for his master’s thesis in architecture at the University of Manitoba) augmented with responsive video and sound. A time-lapse video was created of cleansing and drying experiments over the period of a month and is projected down onto the model itself, giving the effect that the model is evolving on a time-scale faster than our own. Synchretic, synaesthetic, sound was composed to follow the ebb and flow of the time-lapse video and is looped in sync. Movement, captured from a camera above, causes local responses including simultaneous timbral and temporal shifting and blurring in both the video and sound. The model is periodically filled with water, which forms small streams and pools as it flows through sand and around clay foundations. Visitors manipulate not just the computational media, but the physical model itself. Like playing with mud puddles on a dirt road in the rain, they can add material (sand) and shape the flows. The virtual and the real are thus phenomenologically fused to form a hybrid computational-physical material.
Time-Sand: Responsive Microcosm from Morgan Sutherland on Vimeo.
Time-Sand is a collaboration between Morgan Sutherland (concept, responsive video), Gregory Beck Rubin (concept, model), and Aaron Munson (responsive sound). Time-Sand uses software developed by Jean-Sébastien Rousseau, Michael Fortin, and Yoichiro Serita at the Topological Media Lab.
Full documentation can be found at Morgan Sutherland’s website.