The Magic Broccoli Forest
An interactive installation about friendship and depression.
During the pandemic me and my friends used the broccoli emoji 🥦 to stand in for depression when it was too hard to say out loud. Through conversations with them I felt goal-oriented structures washing away, leaving kindness, joy, and care. In this interactive exhibition, I focus on magical portraits of some of the people who represent that care in my life and helped me in my wanderings through this Broccoli Forest of depression.
In the gallery space, viewers are immersed in a forest of inflatable silk broccoli between two real-time rendered projected landscapes on opposite walls.
Each projection wall houses two magical forest friends.
The interactive projections are rendered in Unreal Engine 4.
Above: Gallery walk-trough.
The forest friends are based on the people who have helped me in my wanderings through the Broccoli Forest of depression.
Viewers can attract the creatures by ringing a bell.
Then viewers can call forest friends on their own phones.
When viewers call these forest friends, they hear prerecorded stories from real people in my life. The creatures on screen will pick up the phone when you call in real time.
The calls are handled by Twilio, a programmable tool used by businesses to take and make calls.
My friend Bucky as bread
Physical models of my friends as magical creatures. They were then 3d scanned and used in the inter active projection.
My friend Renee as a stingray
This exhibition was curated by Kevin Brophy for Penn State Berks thanks to support of the Dr. Ruth M. Freyberger Endowment for the Arts. The original presentation of this exhibition was made possible through the support of the Windgate Foundation at Lawrence Art Center, KS.