Our sound machine sculpture makes it possible for the audience to listen to baby sea turtles in their eggs, which coordinate their hatching, the high pitches of the elk, whales, dolphins and batwings to name just a few. The audience decides whether they want to know which sound is produced by which animal. If they wish to know, the information is received through the app “MASTERING PERCEPTION” in which they can find more information about each sound (when where and how it is produces) as well as details about the animals.

 The whole Storytelling Lab is an invitation to immerse oneself in untold stories, sometimes new, sometimes old and yet each one told from a different perspective of a specific animal. Visitors are encouraged to spend several days in the Storytelling Lab, the seat cushions and sofas where especially designed for sleep-ins. All stories which are available in books or journals are also available as audio files and can be downloaded in the App MASTERING PERCEPTION. 

Long in advance and closely collaborating with zoologists and animal behaviour specialists as well as biologists, our team (find out more) went on a journey to understand the anatomy, behaviour and conditions of the portrayed animals.  They then went on and created lifesize creatures which might have existed, still exist or will exist some day in the future. Starting from drawings which use the tools of speculative biology, our actors and physical performers dressed into the tight motion capture suits and tracked by hundreds of special cameras, gave their voices and movement to the creatures. Our team of animators created a setting in which all these non-human creatures came to life.

Audience witness the most amazing breathing and moving creatures and were given the tasks to try and understand the animals they encountered by imitating their shape and body language. Their movement was tracked throughout the time they stayed in the augmented reality room, (you want to know how this was possible without the audience wearing the MoCap suits which can bring to mind wet suits?). The animators now operated at full stretch in order to animate and individual creature based on the tracked movement [see the magic last station]

[Motion Capture – originally a highly complex technological endeavour, became fairly accessible in recent years (since 2021 to be accurate). Especially the medical imagining and medical motion analysis with motion capture in orthopaedics established possibilities to track movement without the costly motion capture suits and special cameras..] 

This is where the audience can find their creature-animation which was printed with a 5D printer while the audience was in the Storytelling Lab. Each creature was created by a team of animators who collected the data the audience created throughout their encounter with the virtual world in the the Augmented Reality Room. Audience members can find their unique creature on a pedestal (they are named after their movement donor). A tag gives a short description of the species together with a footnote that sadly, this particular species is extinct.