Context

After we came up with the idea of exploring the human-nature relationship through interrogating light pollution, we thought about having a projection of cosmos. One precedent that stands out is Osmo, an inflated sphere in which people living in big cities can fully experience the night sky. Cosmos by Leo Villareal, an homage to Carl Sagan, has a screen on top of viewer's head that simulates the universe with particle effects. The two are most directly related with our project in both form and content. 

We thought about tying the projection with audio input as we came across several examples during our research. Celestia is a game where the user uses his/her voice to produce 3 pitches to control the height of the avatar, which is a star. Murmur is an audiovisual installation where the user murmurs into a tube that sends signal to the visual part, producing a particle explosion. 

Some other sound installation pieces that give us some general inspirations include Not So Still Life. It is a LED light art piece that responds to audience input. When a person claps in front of the piece, the flowers will shrink and then expand out slowly, inspiring us to let our stars respond to loud noises. Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin pulls real-time data from the Internet and projects the words into thousands of small blocks while letting a machine voice reading them out. While it inspires us aesthetically, it also shows us a possible way of gathering real-time user input and the idea of collective contribution, which leads us to use ambient noises as sound input. Bach, The Goldberg Variations illustrates music through the use of geometry.