Here Be Dragons was my MFA thesis project, which involved the mixing of Artificial Life methodologies with architectural forms. The same genetic “code” defined both the building shapes and the forms of the creatures inhabiting the space. I started to play with overt abstraction – for instance, the silhouettes becoming recognizable volumes, enforced symmetry producing a Rorschach-like effect on the shapes, allowing viewers to bring in and read more detail than was explicitly designed.

I also experimented with the immersive dimension of the space, beginning my experiments with stereoscopic imagery and tracking systems. The first installation of Here Be Dragons used the Boom3C, an armature that allowed a user to freely look around through a stereo viewer. I also built other “camera hacks,” such as methods of taking panoramic vistas, or ultra-high resolution screenshots by altering the virtual camera’s field of view.

Building off of my MFA project, “Here Be Dragons” has become an experimental preserve, a place to test different effects in a familiar code space. Many versions are something of a second step, applying the “sketches” I develop in simpler prototypes to a 3D navigable space, to see if the ideas that work in 2-dimensions could work in a first-person, realtime perspective