Tendril collaborated with AOI and CYPHER to create a high-fidelity immersive gallery experience for digital art collectors. Built in Unreal Engine, rendered in real-time on the cloud, and streamed via browser on any device, the gallery offers collectors, the public, and artists the ability to experience and showcase digital art, in a natively digital way.
There is an abundance of exceptionally crafted NFT/digital artwork out there and practically no fitting way to experience it. We took on the creative challenge to design and build something for the art and artists that we love. Our mandate was to explore how far we could push the quality of a real-time 3D online museum for digital art — a love-letter to the likes of Naoshima Island or Storm King.
On launch, the immersive theatre of the gallery included a large scale collaborative artwork created by Tendril, titled Life#1. With sound design by CYPHER, this artwork is the first part of an ongoing exploration of the algorithms and processes that guide how living things grow and the forms they will take.
Conceptually, the gallery was designed to be as serene and immersive as possible: blending past and future, nature and architecture, interior and exterior. It’s a space that you can and want to spend time in, exploring and discovering little surprises around each corner (there are easter eggs to be discovered). As digital artists and creators, we are so excited to be able to provide a space for people to enjoy some of the most amazing digital art out there in a setting worthy of its craft and significance.
The generative, ambient music system was designed to produce ever evolving sonic experience within the hub and gallery spaces. Layers of ‘loops’ play in a random order based on sets of defined rules, generating a unique composition on each visit to the gallery. The daytime experience is in a major key, while the night mode is minor, shifting the mood slightly.
A note about the Ambient System
John Black, Cypher
When the opportunity came up to collaborate with Tendril and create the auditory experience for the Shōyu AOI Gallery, I couldn’t have been more inspired by the concept for this immersive space. I immediately decided that it should be something that utilizes procedural music and sound to create a unique, evolving soundscape.
I have been interested in generative music for some time, being familiar with Brian Eno’s Music For Airports and subsequent installation work, I thought it would be fitting to design a procedural system, with additional inspiration coming from the Japanese Kankyō Ongaku ambient music movement of the early 1980s. Kankyō Ongaku literally means ‘environmental music’ and I wanted to bring some of the textures and moods from this genre into the gallery, and contribute to the overall sense of meditative space that we were after.
I decided to use a Pentatonic scale at 88.88 BPM, so that any combination of sound elements, or loops, would sound harmonious, and avoid any dissonance when layered. At night, the soundscape changes to the relative minor for a slightly different feel. Over several sessions, using both hardware and software techniques, sounds were designed that had different properties, divided by texture, melody/sequence and percussive qualities. Each sound was composed to decay ‘naturally’ and were varied in length, so that when looped they would overlap in unpredictable ways, creating chords, new melodies etc. This is one layer of the system.
A randomized player was developed ( with Baud ) in Unreal Engine that utilizes several logics to keep the generative system changing. We have 4 groups of ‘tuned’ loops for both the gallery and main Hub of Shōyu, day and night versions. At any one time, four layers of loops are playing simultaneously, the number of repeats of each sound is randomized (1-3) , as is the order in which they are played, as well as pause time before play. There are around 145 loops in total, providing an incredible amount of variation, while still leaving space for quiet moments to occur. In addition to the tuned loops we placed environmental sounds through the spaces, like wind, crickets and water drops, that are also a part of the sound world.
CREDITS
Client : AOI / Shoyu
Production Company : Tendril
Executive Producer : Ivelle Jargalyn
Creative Director : Chris Bahry
Producers : Emily McCallen & Georgie Patching
Production Coordinator : Jelena Sibalija
Lead Designer : Fede Kanno
Lead Unreal Engine Artist : Christian Hecht
Design & 3D Assets : Rafael Eifler, Rita Louro, Runbo Chen, Yeseong Kim
Developers : Dimitrios Doukas, Miltiades Kotsarinis, Christos Triantafyllis
Lead Asset Prep : Ben Pilgrim
Early Concept & Prototype : Alvaro Navarro, Christian Hoffmann
UI/UX Consulting : Moonprism
UI Design : Gabriel Rocha
Generative Music & Sound Design : John Black // CYPHER
Special Thanks : Vini Naso
life#1
Team Creative Director : Chris Bahry & Alexandre Torres
Executive Producer : Mary Anne Ledesma
Art Direction & Lead Design : Runbo Chen, Yeseong Kim
Houdini Simulations : Philipp Pavlov
Lighting, Render & Compositing : Brad Husband, Yeseong Kim, Chris Bahry
Music & Sound Design : John Black // CYPHER