The conceptual installation, "Nostalgia for the Future" (based on NOIA’s song, Nostalgia del Futoro), celebrates past and future through memory, embodiment, and transformation; based on both experienced and imaginary landscapes. By combining a pre-recorded, dancing body (nostalgia)— placed in an imaginary future; our final project becomes an invitation and interactive space for people to participate in real-time. Expanding upon NOIA’s theory of idealizing a future that can never arrive, our group challenged this theory by creating that future; to which bodies, narratives, and environments evolve.

TouchDesigner is used to isolate the dancer from the pre-recorded video and place the dancing silhouette within an interactive galactic particle field. A Kinect sensor is used to capture the movements of participants who choose to dance across the particle star field with the pre-recorded dancer, bringing a real-time interactive component to the installation. Custom GLSL code is used to composite wireframe silhouettes with feedback particle system silhouettes. These silhouettes are then composited with the particle system star field.

With a focus on somatics, we are inspired by how bodies exhibit themselves in spaces over time, crossing life-spans and panoramas, probing mental, physical, and spatial overlaps between storytelling, body performativity, and diasporas.