Wild At Heart

Through projection mapping and audio soundscapes, Susan Tooke (video/animation), Lukas Pearse (projection) and Daniel O’Neill (audio) brought Halifax's wilderness areas to the Grand Parade. City Hall became the screen for video projections with interpretive animations based on HRM’s parks, wilderness areas and green spaces, while the sounds of these environments echoed off the glass, steel and stone walls of the urban core.

Artists Lukas Pearse, Daniel O'Neill, Susan Tooke

As Halifax contemplates sprawl and the densification of the city core, the surrounding wilderness remains threatened.  Urban growth comes at varying costs to nature; a single hundred-year-old tree is taken down to make room for a widened street, views of our surrounding ocean are interrupted by sky-rise construction. The foot print of the city at the same time as it is edging out wilderness areas, is creating a population that no longer sees themselves as connected to the natural world.

The presentation of visual and acoustic interpretations of the natural spaces around our city highlighted their importance and encouraged conversation on what we value, and who is being served by the destruction of our wilderness areas.

Prototype for the planing of Wild at Heart

The sounds of these areas were combined with the video/animation projections eliciting a public response and awareness of the city’s proximity to nature, the need for conservation and the preservation of our waterways and wild places.

Nocturne 2016: Wild At Heart, Grand Parade

With the heightened discourse in our communities recently surrounding building and the growth of our city, we re-raised the topic of the ways this growth impacts the natural environment we inhabit and changes our relationship with the natural world.

Nocturne 2016: Wild At Heart, Grand Parade

Examining green spaces on a grand scale with projections and soundscapes of these undeveloped lands on City Hall, viewers were encouraged to consider what we may lose, should these wilderness areas disappear.  Ultimately, the community decides, through their representatives on Council, how we preserve our natural heritage.

As a Media Arts Scholar in the Centre For Art Tapes program (August 2014-August 2015), I was immersed in intensive media training involving workshops and mentorships in video and audio recording, editing and production, and the animation techniques of rotoscoping and frame animation.  I was mentored by Nick Bottomley in the use of Isadora, an interactive media presentation tool with the capacity for programming multiple video and audio layers and effects and outputting to multiple projectors.

The project that I developed during this program is 3B: Backlands, Badlands, Burbs.  Initiating a discussion about choices we make as a society on the growth of a city, 3B uses layered video and sound field recordings, still photograph, rotoscoping and frame animation to take the viewer from the wilderness of the Backlands to the development of the new suburban community of Governor's Brook.

Here are some stills from 3B: