The Field of Flowers will emphasize movement. Individual participants’ paths will create waves, while the intersecting paths of groups of cooperating participants will create surprising patterns of color and sound. Thus Field of Flowers offers discoverable individual and cooperative interaction that will respond with gentle beauty to both high-energy and reflective, peaceful participation. By visiting and observing each glowing flower, participants will enact a kind of pollination across the field.
Approximately 150 flowers will be organized in a garden (see attached flower-field-diagram.png). Each flower will be 3-4’ tall with 4-6 leaves and a head about 10” in diameter. The flowers’ stems will be PVC, the heads and leaves will be resin casts. The flowers will be modeled on asters, geraniums, and poppies (see home page). Each flower and leaves will be individually controlled by an ESP32 and wifi. The flowers will contain 20-30 individually-controlled LEDs, as well as 8-10 LEDs in each leaf. Motion will be detected by cameras+RaspberryPis in trees around the garden, coordinated by a laptop, communicating via wifi. The garden will be a space approximately 180’ diameter. We will enclose the garden with a fence to exclude bikes (collisions might damage flowers and Burners), creating a peaceful, walking-only space.
The Field of Flowers invites participants to stroll through the garden. The flowers react to the participants’ movements with waves of color and sound. By moving at different speeds and by changing direction, participants will learn to guide the garden’s waves. By walking toward each other, participants will generate waves that crash together to create interference effects: bigger waves, combinations of colors, and a mix of harmonic sounds.
Our installation will embody easily discoverable, non-representative interactivity that participants will learn to guide through individual and cooperative movement. When participants are still, the garden will dimly glow and quietly sing, offering another mode. Each mode invites the participants to experience the installation as sensation rather than as ego extension. The design of the flowers and their colors will enable participants to see the flowers as bees do, glowing with intense color and gentle sound, inviting a pollinators’ appreciation. By highlighting plants native to northern NV, we evoke locality, biodiversity, and biosecurity. By movement, participants will be immersed in waves of color and gentle sound, as if they were a pollinator taking nourishment and offering reproduction.. By cooperating, people will excite more flowers to awaken a larger immersive experience. By pausing, people will allow the garden to shine and sing to them, creating beauty through stillness.