VizChitra 2025

The Idea
‘Planet Under Pressure’ is a real-time interactive installation that brings the Earth’s condition to life through immersive visuals and sound. Using a MIDI controller with knobs/ sliders, participants can adjust key human-driven environmental factors such as air pollution, water pollution, deforestation, urbanization, overpopulation, waste generation, industrial activity, and climate change accelerators. Each knob corresponds to one factor, allowing users to explore the cause-and-effect relationship between human actions and environmental degradation.

The installation will be built using TouchDesigner, a visual programming tool that enables real-time rendering of complex visual systems. As users turn the knobs, they witness immediate and dramatic shifts in the Earth’s state—from lush and thriving to damaged and chaotic. Glowing forests may fade, oceans may darken, and atmospheric haze might thicken. These changes are reinforced by generative ambient soundscapes that shift in tone and intensity based on the planet’s health, making the experience emotionally powerful and easy to grasp, even for those new to environmental topics or generative art.

As participants turn knobs/ sliders on the MIDI controller, they trigger environmental tipping points—watching the planet go from lush and thriving to dark, cracked, and dystopian. Through delayed feedback loops, regeneration mechanics, and audiovisual shifts, the experience makes climate data visceral and urgent.

Here are few reference items from an initial concept:
• Images: (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kHKw0tTkZWlwjZmUBa2bTxxecbhPKGeW?usp=sharing)
• Video: (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FA-AYXR2AUG-qWi9Qbq2N5zltGiOy3Ln/view?usp=drive_link)

Takeaways:
• Explore how real-time tools like TouchDesigner can be used to explore environmental themes.
• Understand the power of interaction and data visualization in creating emotionally engaging art.

Target Audience
This installation is for new media artists, creative coders, environmental storytellers, designers and anyone interested in using new media art for data art and climate awareness.

About Me
I am Rama Krushna Behera, a full-time product designer working on design systems at Razorpay. Outside work, I dive deep into the intersection of technology and art at Algorhythm Lab (https://www.instagram.com/algorhythm_lab/) — my creative playground for new media art, generative visuals, and plotter experiments. I use tools like p5.js, TouchDesigner, etc. to explore storytelling through data and interactivity.