Bhuvarloka
Thanks to Dajana Hannert for rescuing me, feeding me, and gently sending me to bed after countless hours drifting through the tunnel.
Thanks to Esen K. for sharing the knowledge, mental support, and helping me find poetry in the flat screen.
A river is never twice.
A river is never twice.
INTRO
This document weaves together the threads of a work in progress — a tapestry of ideas, technical challenges, and personal reflections. Like the installation itself, which plays with different tempos of time, this presentation moves between poetic contemplation and practical implementation.
As you navigate these notes, you'll find concepts drawing from Eastern philosophical frameworks and personal experiences of time, and sometimes the grounded language of technical development. This rhythm of shifting between conceptual understanding and concrete implementation mirrors the project's own exploration of liminality — existing between worlds.
What follows is both a map of completed terrain and a sketch of territories yet to be fully explored. This collection reflects my creative process: not strictly linear, but a constellation of interconnected ideas that together form my creative process and Bhuvarloka.
SUNRISE
Once I reached one the top of Brazil's highest mountains to wait for the sunrise. There, rushing through the changing colors of the dusk, I could hold the presence of time.
I wished to stay and observe a whole day cycle, the landscape of transforming lights, the movement of the clouds, the eternal spinning wheel of each moment's death. Though I couldn't stay long, I descended the mountain with the idea of an installation where two video footages, taken from the same spot - the sunrise and the sunset - would be reproduced in a synchronized loop creating a never-ending day.
This idea of creating an eternal day through synchronized video loops became the conceptual seed from which this current project eventually grew. Timelapse and this project allows me to take steps further my original vision: to create an experience where one can contemplate time and natural cycles, understanding something of eternity while simultaneously grasping the impermanent nature of each moment and, perhaps, the impermanence of our own existence.
TEMPORAL LANDSCAPES
Bhuvarloka is an immersive installation exploring interactions with temporal landscapes through gesture-based controls. The agents direct the movement of the sun across a digital panoramic scene, orchestrating the interplay of light and shadow. Waters shift between calm and motion, clouds gather and dissipate, plants undergo cycles of renewal and decay - each element following its own unique and displaced temporal rhythm. While these elements progress at different, asynchronous rates, the sun's movement unifies the landscape in its endless cycle. These temporal flows — along with the surrounding sound effects that agents orchestrate with the same gestures — create an active reflection on time and nature’s rhythms, revealing the tension between human control and the fundamentally untamed pulse of the natural world.
Lokas
Described in the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology, Lokas are the different levels of existence, where beings live their karmic trajectories. Bhuvarloka is a liminal space, a transitional state between the earthly physical realm (Bhu) and the heavenly spiritual realm (Svar). Bhuvar, the subtle layer, represents the atmosphere, the space where celestial bodies, the thoughts and desires reside. Also is a state where time is flexible and experienced in a different way than in the earthly realm. SOURCE
Cross concept: Anicca, the impermanence.
The concept of Anicca - translated from Pali as “impermanence" - represents one of the main principles of the existence in Buddhist philosophy and one of its essential concepts to describe the universe. This fundamental teaching recognizes that everything in our universe exists in constant flux — continuously arising, transforming, and dissolving in endless cycles of change. Whatever appears stable — mountains, galaxies, our bodies, thoughts — reveals itself as temporary when observed over sufficient time. SOURCE
Bhuvarloka is an experience of a liminal realm, where the interlocutor can contemplate and actively transform their perception of time.
Embodying Liminality
The installation takes its name and conceptual grounding from Bhuvarloka, a transitional realm that exists between the physical and the immaterial. This in-between space reflects the project’s position at the edge of tangible and digital experience, where gesture becomes a bridge between body and environment. As a liminal space, Bhuvarloka becomes a way to explore time not as a linear sequence, but as a layered, shifting dimension. The gesture-based interaction reflects the partial agency beings hold within cosmic hierarchies — able to influence, but never fully control, natural forces.
Project Description
On its original idea, the installation occupies a large, dark space where LED screens display a panoramic natural scene, surrounding a pile of rocks in the center. The visitors standing on the rock platform find that they can use gestures to interact with the digital environment. Multiple speakers distributed in the space deliver a soundscape that combines composed ethereal elements with natural recordings, all controlled through these same gestures.
Methodology
I immersed myself in references and research of the poetics of time, investigating works where temporal manipulation becomes both method and subject. I explored how cinematic techniques like timelapse, temporal cuts, and still moments transform time into an explicit narrative element, creating a self-referential experience.
My process also included studying various representations and typologies of landscapes, examining how different environments evoke distinct storytelling opportunities. This research guided my creative decisions about which natural settings would best embody the diversity of narratives I wanted to explore.
For the purpose of this presentation I limited my tasks on creating and understanding the dynamics of the multiple micronarratives - each micronarrative as a single day - and the interaction between them. I developed my skills using Gaea and Unreal Engine to create the visuals and animations of the landscapes, and TouchDesigner to handle the interactions and audiovisual outputs.
Research
Time manipulation as technique and subject
On Rybczyńsk's animation, choreographed chaos emerges through synchronized repetition as characters cycle their routines (or micronarratives).
Das Rad," employ temporal layering where multiple timescales coexist. The relative temporal perception reveals how different beings experience time uniquely, while timelapse transform the imperceptible into visible.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, in his Theater Series compresses the time of a movie into one unique frame by making a long exposure photograph of cinema screens during entire film screenings. SOURCE
Timelapse, slow-motion, still moments and temporal cuts
Movies like Baraka and Chronos, both from the director Ron Fricke, employ timelapse as a narrative language, elegantly juxtaposing nature and civilization. Through this technique, they reveal the contrast between nature's vast, rhythmic temporal flows and the frenetic, compressed and violent energy of human environments — creating visual poetry from these divergent timeframes. SOURCE SOURCE
On the opposite end, Fricke also uses nearly motionless frames that serve as visual anchors. These still, photography-like shots create moments of contemplation, letting viewers notice details that would disappear in faster sequences. By alternating between extreme speeds and near stillness, Fricke makes time itself both a subject and a storytelling tool.
Bill Viola's "The Greeting" extends moments through extreme slow-motion, revealing emotional subtleties normally invisible. SOURCE
The cinematic temporal cut — exemplified by Kubrick's bone-to-spaceship transition in 2001: A Space Odyssey — compresses thousands of years into the jump of a single frame.
Landscapes
My research on landscape imagery emerged organically from diverse sources: my personal travel experiences and photo collection, AI-generated images, and even the kitsch aesthetics of operating system screensavers. These varied references converged to inform the visual language of the project. The important was to understand the dynamics between the different actors of the scenes.
Contradictorily, the illusion of guiding time's flow reveals its fundamental uncontrollable and impermanent nature.
First lights: about the Creative Process
Contradictorily, the illusion of guiding time's flow reveals to the interlocutor its fundamental uncontrollable and impermanent nature. This tension — between presence and ephemerality, agency and inevitability — lies at the heart of this project.
This work emerges from a convergence point in my practice — where nature, spirituality, art, and technology meet. Inspired by Eastern philosophical traditions where concepts of impermanence and temporal experience are central, as well as perspectives from the Global South that offer alternative descriptions of the reality. Bhuvarloka arises from personal meditative practices, readings and explorations on the invisible, and artistic and spiritual experiences that have shaped my understanding of temporality.
This installation is, in essence, a sensory meditation — an invitation to contemplate time not as a linear progression, but as a layered, multidimensional experience.
Initial sketches and prototypes
The early steps of the development phase included creating digital sketches, collecting 3D assets, and building experimental landscapes in Unreal Engine. The objective was to understand how light movements and materials could evoke the flow of time. These initial renderings helped shape the project’s visual language and served as a way to experiment with the poetic potential of digital environments.
For the interaction tests, I started with P5.js in combination with MediaPipe, a computer vision library that handles gesture and pose recognition. This setup worked nicely for early experiments. However, as the concept evolved, I realized that a more robust and adaptable framework was required to accommodate the project's increasing complexity. This encouraged me to use TouchDesigner to manage both interactions and audiovisual outputs.
A significant turning point came during the landscape creation with Gaea, a procedural terrain design software I used to define the environments. My first impulse was to design some alpine-inspired mountains, Gaea software itself on its procedural choices guides to it, but I felt something was a bit off — these weren't landscapes I had personal affective connections with. This realization encouraged me to look closer to environments that resonated with my lived experience, while avoiding a certain "colonization on the imaginary of mountains and landscape representation".
The perception that there is a form of colonization on the imaginary of landscape representation influenced me to experiment with scenes that were more resonant with my personal experience.
Digital Horizons: Technical Development
The technical development of the project involved 4 main workflows across terrain design and material behavior, light composition, 3d assets / components integration and parametrization, and gesture interaction and controls.
Terrain design
The landscape creation began in Gaea, where I generated heightmaps while actively trying to escape from the software tendency towards stereotypical mountain forms. These heightmaps were then imported into Unreal Engine, where terrain and material generation evolved side by side.
The materials have a special character as they dynamically respond to terrain features, such as angle and elevation. Steep surfaces, for example, naturally don't hold vegetation, revealing bare rock beneath. And vegetation tends to grow more abundantly on the base of the mountains.
Sun positioning and light design
To guide the movement of the sun with accuracy and consistency, I used a sun positioning plugin, which allowed me to set geographical coordinates, cardinal directions, date and time. This precise control was essential for guaranteeing controlled results that could be replicated along the several micronarratives.
Environmental Elements
Vegetation, wind behavior, cloud typologies, water materials and movement, fog, and rocks were sourced from various libraries and collections. Each element was selected, transformed and later parameterized for animation control, allowing detailed tuning across scenes.
Interaction System
My experience with TouchDesigner was especially rewarding. Despite its aparent complexity, the software offered a straightforward workflow for managing real-time interactions on audiovisual outputs. Its modular nature made it ideal for this kind of immersive installation. The TouchDesigner community also played an important role, generously offering support and solutions throughout the development process.
Technical notes on the interaction system
The procedural network for this project is essentially simple and effective. The landmark position of the hands is calculated on the X axis, serving as the main control parameter for the pre-generated videos and audio assets. From left to the right of the screen, the agent can control the video reproduction from beginning to the end, with some easing added to make reproduction and stop points smooth. When positioning reaches the right edge of the screen, it triggers a switch to the next video in the video playlist (through a Switch TOP).
The interaction with sound works with the same landmark inputs, but instead of controlling the reproduction timeline linearly — which remains intact during all the experience — the calculated difference in hand positioning between subsequent time samples (using a Slope CHOP) serves as the main mechanism to distort the speed and volume of natural field recordings. The more energetic the gesture, more intense is the effect. In this version, wind and bird sounds are distinct superposed elements, controlled independently. The soundtrack remains unaltered and doesn't undergo distortion throughout the experience, unifying the soundscape.
Controlling video assets was the most efficient approach to guarantee the experience fluidity. While it's possible to connect Unreal Engine with TouchDesigner using plugins — potentially allowing independent control of actors in the micronarrative — this approach demands significant computer resources and expensive professional licenses that weren't feasible for this version of the project.
The soundtrack Œillet en Delta by Marten Jules was gently provided for use in this version of the project.
Sunset: Final results and considerations
Before presenting the video that showcases the interaction dynamics of the installation, where the full collection of micronarratives unfolds through gesture (9 in total), I chose to first present two complete micronarratives. The sequences exemplify the atmosphere, rhythm, and temporal flow that define the essence of the work. It is followed by a video illustrating the gesture-based interaction, offering a glimpse into how the agents — the time travelers — engage with and influence the digital environment.
The project has reached a stage where it feels almost ready for a first physical presentation and for experiments with other scales. The implementation works well as a unified experience while still leaving room for growth. I see many possibilities for refinements and the creation of new narrative layers.
The idea of expanding the set of micronarratives and eventually building entirely new landscapes remains open. These additions would deepen the poetic dimension of the work and diversify the experience.
I plan to present the project further — sharing it with institutions, applying to art residencies, and seeking sponsorship opportunities to bring the installation into a full physical realization.
Throughout this process, I’ve grown enormously — not only technically but conceptually. Over time, I became more comfortable navigating the complex tools and systems involved, reaching a point where the technical challenges began to fade into the background, giving more space to focus on the poetic and aesthetic intentions of the work.
This project also shifted my perception of time itself — revealing new ways of representing temporality and inspiring me to shape my own narrative language. It became clear that time is not just a subject in the installation, but a material in itself — something to sculpt, stretch, and reflect through digital nature.
Ideas for Future Development
Looking ahead, the next iteration of the project will involve deeper exploration of the soundscape — creating more layered, immersive, and responsive sonic environments. I also intend to develop more complex and intricate narrative threads within the landscapes, something that naturally grows with time and experience.
Adding more randomness and variability to the gesture-based interactions is also a direction I’m interested to pursue — embracing unpredictability and creating a sense of organic behavior within the system.
And of course, new landscapes will continue to emerge — each one a vessel for a different rhythm, mood, and reflection.
I see this project as a living piece — one that can grow, evolve, and be adapted to different contexts and scales.
Final Reflections
This work brought together everything that matters to me — nature, spirituality, art, and technology. It grounded me, challenged me, and reminded me why I create in the first place.
Beyond being a project about time, it became a practice in patience, attention, and presence. It showed me how digital tools can hold poetic weight, and how the most subtle movements — a flicker of light, a shifting cloud — can speak of impermanence, cycles, and life itself.