Bringing 19th-century drawings to life
A slow loris peers curiously through a fringe of leaves. A tapir lumbers heavily past. A deer emerges from the undergrowth, is startled and gallops off into a burst of petals.
These are among the inhabitants of the digital rainforest through which visitors to the glass rotunda of the National Museum of Singapore can now wander.
Story Of The Forest, an interactive installation inside the revamped rotunda, opened to the public last Saturday.
Japanese digital art collective teamLab was commissioned to create the work, which brings to life 69 illustrations from the museum's William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings.
The collection comprises 477 watercolour drawings of regional flora and fauna in the 19th century commissioned by Farquhar, Singapore's first British Resident.
The museum's director, Ms Angelita Teo, hopes the installation will help more visitors, especially younger ones, connect with the Farquhar collection.
"To young people, these are just drawings. Using technology to bring them to life could excite them to look at them more closely."
On entering the rotunda from the second floor, visitors cross a bridge under a dark dome, from which constellations of digital flowers constantly tumble.
Visitors then walk down a spiral slope around the rotunda's cylindrical drum and pass through a virtual forest projected onto the walls, through which animals move.
A mobile app offers visitors the chance to "capture" the animals they spot, somewhat like in the smartphone game Pokemon Go, and find out facts about them.
At the bottom of the rotunda, luminous trees spring up as flowers cascade onto them. As more people move around the space, more trees and animals will emerge.
It took 30 artists from teamLab 21/2 years to complete the work, which is projected onto screens about 170m long. When asked to rate how difficult it was on a scale of one to 10, the collective's founder Toshiyuki Inoko gives it a solid 10.
The greatest difficulty, the 39year-old says in Japanese through a translator, was to create a seamless illusion on the rotunda's curved interior, using close to 60 painstakingly positioned projectors.
TeamLab is known for cuttingedge installations that meld art and technology, such as Crystal Universe at ArtScience Museum, where 178,000 LED lights react to visitors' movement, giving the illusion of stars moving in space.
The National Museum project was, however, the first time teamLab had worked with so much curved surface. It had to build a life-size replica of the dome in a warehouse in Tokyo, where it is based. This was to make sure it got everything right for its set-up in Singapore, which took two months.
The heat created by the projections was another problem. A second, smaller fireproof dome had to be built inside the 15m-high rotunda to house the installation, to mitigate fire risk and block out light and heat.
Ms Teo recalls the challenges of construction within the tight, round confines. "The scaffolding itself was a work of art," she quips.
She praises the dedication of the Japanese team towards perfecting the most minute details. "They would spend hours programming the fall of a single leaf."
Rather than a video that plays on a loop, the animation is a computer program that reacts in real time to visitors. This means no scene will be repeated.
"We want to break boundaries between the artwork and the viewer," says Mr Inoko.
His favourite way to enjoy the installation is to lie on the floor at the bottom of the rotunda. Whenever somebody crosses the bridge above, a tree will shoot up next to him.
He says dreamily: "All the flowers are falling and it's like I am floating, suspended, navigating the universe."