Trailer for my interactive video project Tree Travelling: Boom the Boom!
New presentation:
• December 2-16, 2023: Festival Nuvola Creativa, curated by Antonietta Campilongo, Villa di Massenzio, Rome.
The original version of my interactive installation consists in a monitor with a video of the world map full of airplanes flying contemporary, generated from a real-time radar view. In front of the monitor there is a small tree trunk. Moving it you fill the surface of the world with growing trees, while the airplanes disappear slowly – the more you move the tree trunk, the more the earth becomes green and the less becomes the air traffic.
Another meaning of the word “boom” is “tree”, in my mother tongue Dutch. Therefore my slogan is: Boom the Boom!
click on the image to open the page of the whole project
When I wrote the concept of this work, we were in the middle of a global tourism boom. The tourism boom brought economic growth, but the damages were severe, especially from an ecological point of view. Almost all cheap international mass travels were flights. It was alarming when you realized how many airplanes were in the air right now and how much CO2 was emitted every moment.
But then, in March 2020, the world was rapidly overwhelmed by coronavirus and most countries went in lockdown. The tourism boom collapsed in no time. The airplanes disappeared and the sky became clearer.
I went back to the real-time radar view of the airplanes and generated a new video. The difference between the two videos is impressive. Do we really need this bloody coronavirus to make the sky clearer and the earth healthier?
This new version (2021) of my installation is a pure online version and thus can be played by everyone in the world. I created two situations: pre-corona and post-corona, and you can choose in which one you want to enter.
The work was presented from 19th to 21st June 2020 as part of the festival 48 Stunden Neukölln in Berlin, and on July 15-25, 2021 at the 5° Festival Ecrã, Brazil.
