Imagine stumbling upon a tangle of knots in a hyperdimensional tornado. Your movement extending into ruptured surfaces and relentless, tentacled curvature. Sonic fields splattering into (re)modulated and (un)structured light. Strange shapes brushing against your skin, destabilizing your motion. You feel your limbs slowing down, until you carefully crawl on a smooth surface of a large pliant membrane and dare to touch the fickle world around you. Through the bumps and craters, pocky skin and viscous liquids, you can feel it touching back, becoming aware of your intentions, opening up its secrets and allowing you to affect its physical forces. Attracting, repulsing, binding and transforming the fundaments of the world, you gradually grasp the dialogue forming through the stormy fingers of this world. You feel a nauseating disruption of your visual perception, as the empty space in between physical objects begins filling up with elusive imagery of bubbling, luminescent membranes, whispering in deep tectonic voices. Unable to orient yourself using your eyes and ears, you rely on your sense of touch to traverse the space…

based on Project TRG Universe

fundaments of experience: the transient reality opens up (unfolds, uncurls…) as a player opens up to 'it'. 'sensual' attention and careful exploration make the transient reality dare to come 'alive', revealing its more detailed (articulated) and subtle qualities.

three dimensions/scales/stages of unfolding (that can smoothly transition from one to the other, from highly compacted to highly expanded (and back again) depening on the activities of the players):

- infinite membranes; massive, uniform, smooth universe, composed of mainly vast ranges of empty space, delineated by large undulating, curling translucent membranes; the players (feel like they) are immensely small, surrounded by an emptiness in which the membrane-worlds are immersed. their actions can influence mainly a large scale force (such as gravity)

- entangled worldsheets; dynamic landscapes coming into existence as the dimensions of the large membrane-worlds unfold. the players can find themselves above, underneath or inside these landscapes and modulate the tangling, breathing, expanding, appearing and disappearing, by acting as a charged, attractive/repulsive force.

- charged tissues; a fragmented, frothing system of spaces with different densities. surfaces that seem smooth worldsheets thicken into pocky, porous, thick tissues modulating the densities between larger spaces/cells. the players (feel like they) are extremely small, being able to touch the microscopic dimensions of the transient reality. the exploration on this scale relies primarily on touch and hearing (vision being blurred by a lack of distance).

if successful, the trg space should change the normalised perception of the reality, with particular attention to the disruption of the visual perception, and amplification of the tactile and aural senses. thereby the players should become uncertain of what is 'real' and what is an 'illusion' and intuitively grasping that everything is entangled with everything else (including the physical+digital, actual+imaginary…), albeit on different scales.

• sketches and renders for the architecture: Project TRG Space
• requirements and prototypes for materials: Project TRG Materials
• participants entering in the space wear spherical projection screens on their heads in the form of Project TRG Bubbles

particle systems on three scales:

• charged tissues: a large amount of individual swarming particles making spaces denser/sparser
• entangled worldsheets: particles form into knotted networks forming dynamic, stringy landscapes
• infinite membranes: the networks of particles transform into smooth, undulating surfaces (or blur to make it look like they are forming surfaces, while they still remain independent entities)

other graphic elements (skeletons/meshes/surfaces/??)

• infinite membranes: smooth, large, translucent surfaces (with a lot of emptiness between them). their shapes and movement appear to be formed by the movement of the visible and invisible particles
• transition: the smooth surfaces become holey, porous (- this should mainly be done through textures), curved and knotted - through topological transformations such as curling/uncurling, folding/unfolding, stretching, fusing…

• entangled worldsheets: a tentacled, layered and curving landscape. the particle system flows/grows/dissolves through the semi translucent skins of the world. the skins float and bubble, increase and decrease tension in all directions, and although it appears as if you are looking at the landscape from above, the ground is never visible, as if the skins could be peeled off endlessly, without ever reaching the bottom (what at one moment looks like the bottom, appears to be a less transparent part of another skin.
• transition: the scale of the world expands/unfolds and the tentacles surround the whole view (as in a forest of snake-trees). they are grouped to form thick fibrous spaces (like dense semi-permeable membrane walls)

• charged tissues: the tentacles form an overgrown system of dense and sparse spaces, knotting and moving, swaying / wiggling around you. They appear to be permeable to the groups of particles flowing through the world. The tentacles are hollow, but the space inside appears denser, filled with independent particle systems that are sucked from one tentacle to the other, using the tentacles for signalling to remote swarms…

• ………./materials/textures/lighting/cameras…

• small examples of what can be done with KnotPlot > Project TRG Knots
• using breve to produce knot-like shapes (sometimes) > Project TRG Breving
• impressions of atmosphere Project TRG Universe
• while the behaviour and dynamics of the space will de generated by the particle systems and/or other graphic processes, the materials/shaders/… operating on the surfaces/particles will give the space its rich look and feel
• Example movies of particle/material/ > Project TRG graphic demos

• tectonic ambience rather than 'musical composition'
• tactile qualities of the sound (making different regions of the space thicker/sparser) should be emphasized by using low frequency vibrations
• players don't have 'voices', instead, their actions can modulate the environmental sound, they are playing the environment
• polylogue of the aging tectonics of the environment with newly introduced (through the actions of the players) volatile (organic) matter

through scales

• infinite membranes: the voices of the membranes are 'old', deep, airy, smeared grains of sound lumping together to form large humming fields; intrusions from the players are audible in the modulation of the membrane voices, but also in the addition of the 'younger', higher frequency, but lower volume grains, changable in direction, range and amount
• entangled worldsheets: the low humming fields expand and can be modulated across a wider frequency range (as if the younger 'organic' grains penetrated the older ones and are infecting their voices)
• charged tissues; the smooth fields of sound fragment into clicking, gurgling, bubbling and gasping - this is the scale of the volatile matter - where no sound can last for longer than a second

• 2-4 force model for the dynamics of the universe (still need to define their response to player's behaviour)
• players are seen as disturbances of the otherwise balanced dynamics
• direct+indirect feedback (discrete / continuous)
• persistence and impermanence in the interactive model
• ……..

• bar - perceiving the invisible, climate change…
• entrance - introduction/idoctrination ;): foot jacuzzi, sia…

system design can be found in Project TRG System