‘Ocean Of Memories’ Soundwalk Collaboration With Chromic Duo Brings Augmented Reality Experience To Aggie Park
Augmented reality, soundscapes and storytelling will come together in an event titled “Ocean of Memories,” Oct. 1 at 5 p.m. in the Swaim Amphitheater in Aggie Park.
The soundwalk was created by artists in residence Dorothy Chan and Lucy Yao — known as Chromic Duo — in collaboration with students and faculty in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts.
Participants will be audibly guided via a smartphone app through Aggie Park, visiting stations that encompass stories about bodies of water through visuals, narration and sounds. Headphones are encouraged for an immersive, narrative experience.
Guests will experience augmented reality as objects orbit around their screens through the app created by Dr. Edgar Rojas-Muñoz and students in the Visualization program and the College of Engineering.
Chan and Yao worked with students in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts from fall 2023 to spring 2024. In October, they came as guest artists to perform a concert at Rudder Forum that blended classical music, traditional and toy piano, synthesizer and recorded voice samples.
For “Ocean of Memories,” the artists worked with students in seven classes in the Visualization; Performance and Visual Studies; and Music Performance programs to create performance concepts and music compositions, as well as developing the augmented reality elements.
“Their interest in combining performance and technology is really person-focused, and human-focused in an exciting way,” said Dr. James R. Ball III, associate dean for industry and community engagement and associate professor of Performance Studies. “They are keen to use the tools that we have available to tell really important human stories.”
Chromic Duo collaborated with the college to focus the story on one of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Of the 17 goals, “Life Below Water” generated the most responses from students as they created thesis statements, performances and artwork inspired by the prompt. Chan and Yao curated these elements for the final piece. Yao said they enjoyed making a multidisciplinary project with students who were open to “expanding the traditional definition of being an artist.”
“It’s not just music or painting by itself, but how all of these different mediums — writing a script for a story, putting together scenes with visual artists, working with people who are in computer science and engineering — can all collaborate to make a powerful story for people to experience,” Yao said. “And that’s where immersive experiences with augmented reality can be really fun to create.”
Chan and Yao gathered research from Texas A&M’s Sea Grant and Texas A&M’s Office of Sustainability and Campus Enrichment to work with students in discovering issues that involve ocean life. Chan said they asked students to think about things they connect to in their community and things they are passionate about.
“We hope that students can keep doing the work beyond this project to create work that will spark change. It’s just the beginning,” Chan said. “They exhibited so much thought in the process, and generated such great material. There is really a lot of potential.”
To incorporate augmented reality, Chan and Yao worked with Muñoz, assistant professor in Visual Computing, and Kylee Friederichs, lead technician and graduate student in Computer Engineering, to create the app to showcase their curation of student projects. Rojas-Muñoz said he and his students designed the app to be cohesive with the “Life Below Water” theme.
“The goal has always been to make people more conscious of the ocean, the impact that we have on the oceans and what is next,” he said. “We designed three augmented reality stations, all located around a pond in Aggie Park. This way, people will still be able to see the water, which is the main driver in this experience. By using the app, users will visualize objects and news regarding ‘Life Below Water’ directly in their view.”
When guests arrive in Aggie Park, they will scan a QR code to download the app, which will use GPS to guide them through the storyline with music and visual art, along with news articles and videos popping in and out, Rojas-Muñoz said.
Yao said the ocean metaphor depicts how the world collectively thinks about problems. This experience allowed them to create spaces for people to gather and think critically, she said.
“Art can be used as a vehicle to create dialogue around large issues and civic engagement,” Yao said. “How do we all collectively and individually take action? I am excited to collaborate and be able to use art to create spaces — like ‘Ocean of Memories’ — for people to reflect on these issues.”
Ball said he is eager to see how students interpreted the sustainability goal, and hopes guests think differently about the spaces they inhabit on campus. He also hopes guests enjoy the collaborative experience connected to the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts.
“In our college, we bring the technologists and the performing artists together in really rigorous and integral ways,” he said. “We see how all these different elements of what we are doing, and avenues of exploration that might be really disparate and distributed and kind of all over the place, can come together organically in these interesting projects.”
