Hill Making
A piled stone hill that feels with you.
Classical gardens, biosensing and generated sound and light.
As a child, a stone hill in the park was my favourite place.
I wandered up and down the rocks, through high platforms and caves, getting lost and then suddenly finding my way. For the old garden owners, who walked their gardens alone, these hills were where feelings could be let out.
I broke the hills down into five kinds of space.
Cave, gorge, cliffside, tunnel and platform, joined by a graph of my own: planar, undirected, sometimes cyclic, weighted by length. I tested it on several famous hills.
A stone you touch reads how you feel.
Inside the Sensus Stone, GSR and PPG sensors on an Arduino measure your skin and pulse, and a small model sorts the signal into burnout, stress, calmness or stimulation.
In the paintingThe feeling it answers
Mountainsthey broaden the heartBurnoutnegative, low arousal
Cloudsthoughts drift with themStressnegative, high arousal
Waterit stills the heartCalmnesspositive, low arousal
Treesthey bring sprouting mindsStimulationpositive, high arousal
Each feeling answers with a piece of a landscape painting.
Each feeling calls up its element as generated visuals and music around you: TouchDesigner for the images, ChatGPT and Stable Audio for the sound.
Strangers in the same cave hear each other.
When two visitors touch the stones, their music and visuals overlap. A space that once held one person’s feelings becomes a way to meet.
- Role
- Research, design and prototyping, solo
- Type
- Personal project
- Tools
- Arduino, GSR and PPG sensors, TouchDesigner, ChatGPT API, Stable Audio
- Year
- Fall 2023
- Video
- Watch the demo