Folly Feast Lab (Viviane El Kmati and Yara Feghali)
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
Virtual Herbaria, 2023
Video demo, free and downloadable AR app
Virtual Herbaria is a site-specific iteration of an AR (augmented reality) app designed by Folly Feast Lab for the CalArts campus. Looking at local and native plant species, it questions the way we visualize and utilize large data sets, archives, and libraries. The app underscores a moment of increasing hybridity, where relationships with technology and devices are merged with one's experience of nature. The work revives the flora of the local region and presents a data set of colorful three-dimensional plants that are digitally augmented throughout the flowerbeds, trees, and other horticultural lives of the CalArts Campus. Through AR, Virtual Herbaria turns the campus and its circular road into an immersive experience of flourishing flowers for viewers to experience.
Instructions: Scan the QR code through an Apple or Android smartphone device to download the app, or search for “Virtual Herbaria” in the app store. Once you activate the app, a map will guide you to various locations throughout the outdoor areas of CalArts campus where the virtual flowers are scattered.
Mediterranean Sea Diaries, 2019
Video demo of an interactive VR forum for an open world game, 1:52 min
Mediterranean Sea Diaries is a video representation of an interactive VR forum for an open-world game exploring the Anthropocene’s repercussions on the Mediterranean coast. It is a research and design project that imagines the future of spaces like e-waste landfills resulting from overproduction. These spaces are depicted as a cautionary tale for the near future of the Mediterranean coast and are based on recent events around the politics of waste management that led Lebanon to dump its waste in the Mediterranean Sea.
ARTIST BIO
Folly Feast Lab is an XR studio based in Santa Monica founded by Viviane El Kmati (technology director) and Yara Feghali (creative director). Through worldbuilding and storytelling we design fantastic experiences that are as aesthetically engaging as they are technologically performing through immersive and interactive apps, software, and games around queer identity, sustainability, and technology. We were part of Fiber Festival, A+DMuseum, LAForum, Ars Electronica, TBA 21Academy, MU Hybrid Art House, XR2C2 Côte d’Azur, and Art Science Museum in Singapore.