Muse is an imaginative response to the civic spaces of Caboolture and contemplation on their layered cultural and ecological presences.
Muse emerged from Peter’s encounters with the Caboolture Town Centre's physical and social environments, combined with his childhood memories and experiences of the Moreton Bay region. As a visual synecdoche, Muse represents a small part or fragment of a larger system that implies its whole.
Through a touch of humour, Muse brings the omnipresent, yet perhaps unnoticed or overlooked aspects of everyday life to the fore so they may become newly visible.
Creative approach
Muse aims to activate Caboolture’s existing yet latent energies and increase their flows and circulation by adopting the principals of urban acupuncture – characterised as small therapeutic interventions with urban systems – to offer a moment of mental rest from everyday life.
Metaphorically, a muse is a source of inspiration: a quiet presence that stirs the imagination and sets creative energy in motion. Much like the springs of the Muses, Muse operates as a surprising and delightful landmark where a magical spillover of inspiration forms a nervous system of wonder that encourages people to linger longer..
Muse’s many sublime visual references and its compressed temporalities – the seasonal changes and tidal shifts associated with coastal life – create a sense of departing the real world and arriving in an unexpected and surreal place.
Design
Muse overlays the Caboolture Town Centre with a windowed view into a simulated world, beyond the screen surface, where encounters with the more-than-human momentarily alter citizens’ perceptions of reality.
Mock-up of Muse on the City of Moreton Bay Outdoor Gallery’s projection screen. This video demonstrates how Muse operates, relative to the physical environment surrounding it and the position of the viewer standing in the gallery area. Specifically, it uses a low camera angle, and a wide field of view to position the work as a floating window in space, through which the viewer is taken on a surreal journey.
The work’s hybrid visual language combines the aesthetics of digital games and simulations with the cinematic framing and smooth forward fly-through movement of a virtual camera and a motion stabilisation system to create a playful hyperreality. Muse’s mimetic metaphor of a virtual world is infused with the intentionality associated with the post-digital art movement that dismantles, repurposes, and reconstructs technological systems to elucidate the hidden digital world.
Muse was created using a game engine and rules-based procedural generation processes. The fixed position of Muse's moon, sun, town centre are points from which the simulation pivots and turns. These stationary elements are juxtaposed with a floating horizon and numerous animated scenarios that dynamically break from the constraints of real-world physics. While the parameters of the various simulated objects are defined by a human, the behaviours of the non-human entities are computationally randomised and calculated millions of times per second by the system’s code and algorithms, which cannot be controlled by a human.