The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia had the honour to participate for the 5th time in the LLUM BCN, Festival D’arts Lumíniques de Barcelona. From the 05th to the 07th of November, the city celebrated brightening up the 10th anniversary of this acclaimed festival.

LLUM BCN is “a large-scale laboratory of the nocturnal landscape, featuring artists with long-standing careers on the international scene” who come together to shine and transform an industrial location to challenge the way we perceive and interact with the public space.

In this special occasion, IAAC’s students of the Master in Advanced Architecture (MAA02) and Master in Robotics and Advanced Construction (MRAC02) presented the Lumina Foresta installation performed at the Parc Central de Poblenou.

Lumina Foresta

¿Did you know that 500 trees are needed to offset the footprint of each European citizen?

Climate change and the need to offset the negative impact we have on the environment are among the world’s main global challenges. An average EU citizen produces 12,000 kg of CO2 every year, an adult tree absorbs 22 kg of CO2 and one acre of vegetation can absorb 2,500 kg of CO2 in that period. At the current pace, every EU citizen would have to plant 4.8 acres of trees to compensate for their carbon footprint.

Lumina Foresta is an exhibition that explores the intersection between nature and the digital world or the ecological and the artificial. It hails from the cries of today’s environmental crises, evident as quantified data of carbon emissions in our urban areas, which also affect our natural habitats and evoke a sense of responsibility from the citizens who interact with the installation.

Attendees will be able to interact with the Lumina Foresta installation, which plays with its carbon footprint and the power of plants to transform it into oxygen. At the end of the experience, citizens receive seed bombs as gifts to carry out actions to re-naturalize their urban environment. Lumina Foresta is part of the project Public Play Space, co financed by the Creative Europe Program of the European Commission and the project Co-mida supported by the programme ‘La Ciutat Proactiva’ of BIT Habitat Barcelona.

The installation shows a structure of a bare tree waiting to be filled. It relies on a night vision camera to map the position and movement pattern of the citizens. Using real-time computational processes, these data can then be transformed into a visualization of the CO2 particles produced by the audience, on a 3dimensional effect projection. These particles are attracted to the branches of the tree and then released as O2 particles. When there is no one interacting with the installation, there are be an ongoing projection of oxygen particles around the virtual tree.

As part of the development of the project and the interaction on the site, the team put together a photogrammetry point cloud model of the chosen location and the installation’s placement on site. This location provided opportunities for accessibility and visibility, while the positioning of the installation in between 4 trees allows the projected particles to be refracted onto the surroundings, immersing the viewers and the natural environment into the experience. The circular configuration of the proposal allows for a 360* interaction area around the installation

Students: Abhishek Sharma, Aditya Mandlik, Aditya Ambare, Alisa Iureva, Andrea Giacomo De Stasio, Eve Nnaji, Harsh Vora, Léa Garguet-Duport, Roberto Vargas Calvo, Matthew Gordon, Muhammad Mansoor Awais, Siddharth Aryamane, Sneha Vivek, Stefana Zapuc, Vatsal Kapadia and Yash Palshetkar.

Faculty: Cristian Rizzuti and Pablo Ros.

Collaborators: Chiara Farinea, Mathilde Marengo, Nikol Kirova, Fiona Demeur, Mohamad Elatab.

Digital fabrication expert: Shyam Zonca

Partners:

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