Luminiferous Funeral

In response to the growing climate crisis,Luminiferous Funeralis an interdisciplinary Virtual Reality game-art work with a physical sensory perception installation. This work explores the invisible erosion of climate change and environmental breakdown by offering audiences an opportunity to dialogue with nature and seeks to focus participants on the inner communication with oneself about the essential nature of life and death. The relationship to nature is harnessed by our open-source framework in which we seek collaborative interactivity from others - encouraging them to journey within their localnature spaceand document their phenomenological relationship with the environment through sound clips, sketches, video, photographs, and other forms of digital media. Through communication with corresponding environmental and climate scientists, and by combining this user-centric data input with known local climate and weather models, the playable game-art is continuously evolving - downloadable game patches periodically transform a player’s virtual world. With a Zen inspired ideology, our cloud-based Artificial Intelligence systems employ Natural Language Processing on texts describing Eastern and Western philosophies of nature, power, fear and love, space and environment - crafting responses into poetic expressions, and physical interpretations of, this ongoing accumulation of climate content used to create the downloadable game.