Immersive installation · AI sense-making
Ombre nella Valle a listening system
An installation that listens to a forest and to the people in it, and writes their relationship as a slowly growing mycelial drawing.
- Client
- Foresta Maestra Music Festival
- Year
- 2026
- Location
- Vallombrosa, Reggello
- Role
- Concept, experience & system design, visual language
Presence, time, listening. An immersive, AI-assisted installation and talk format for the Foresta Maestra Music Festival — designed to turn ambient signals into a shared moment of sense-making.
Challenge
Make presence tangible
Without turning the forest into data spectacle. The experience had to stay calm, legible and emotionally truthful while revealing invisible dynamics — attention, rhythm, time passing.
Solution
A system that listens first
AI is used for interpretation, not noise: clustering, summarising and translating signals into a minimal visual language and prompts for collective reflection.
Output
A kit built to repeat
Spatial layout and interaction flow, a live guided-session script, and a visual identity for screens and documentation — designed for future editions.
Concept
Mycelial calligraphy
Not data presented as information, but a relationship made perceivable: forest conditions and human presence as one continuous, reciprocal system. The visitor is not an observer — they are a perturbation within the same substrate.
A mycelial network is the right metaphor because it is real — hidden connection, distributed exchange, permeability — and visually fertile. The output is not a chart but a slow calligraphy that accumulates, remembers and changes structure when the environment changes.
Signal grammar
How the forest writes
- 01
Presence
Branching, new nodes, reroutes — presence changes structure, not just glow.
- 02
Wind
Curvature bias and lean: a force field on future growth.
- 03
Humidity
Diffusion, ink bleed, soft halos — permeability and saturation.
- 04
Noise
Edge fray and micro-jitter: granular instability at the boundaries.
- 05
Light
Revelation and layer visibility — what becomes perceivable, not just brightness.
Live prototypes
Play with the system
The same logic, running live in the browser. Watch the network grow on its own, or take manual control of the signals and read how the system responds.
System
A listening pipeline
Light, temperature, humidity, wind, sound and presence are sensed, condensed by an AI layer into a coherent state over time, then rendered three ways: a live visual field, a sound reading of the same state, and shareable traces — stills, loops and an end-of-day atlas page.
Open channel
Let’s make something playable.
Art direction, world building, narrative and interactive prototypes. Remote from Italy, or on site.
epoli.uk@gmail.com