Touch eternity
What if you could manage time not metaphorically, but literally? Swipe your hand and flip through millions of years of Earth's history like the pages of a book. The interactive installation "Dawn of a New Era" offers just such an experience. It immerses the viewer in the distant Permian period, an era that ended with the largest catastrophe in the history of life on the planet. This is not just a lesson in paleontology, but an invitation to meditate on the fragility of any world and the incredible power of life that can rise from the ashes. The closer your hand is to the screen, the deeper you plunge into the past, right up to the moment when touching becomes a symbolic contact with the ancient Earth.
The story of one image
The creative impulse for the project was an open competition for the exhibition "Paleosphere", dedicated to the Permian period. This challenge coincided with my personal research: I was looking for a style that would combine technology with artistic expression. In the process of these searches, I suddenly came across one special image that immediately hooked me. It didn't have the horror of extinction or the drama of volcanic eruptions. There was something else about him, a quiet, almost shy promise of a new beginning. I instantly understood: this is the very "dawn" that came after the disaster.
It was a landscape. Not just beautiful, but filled with a special feeling of quiet hope after a global catastrophe. I saw in it the very "dawn of a new era" that came after the Great Permian Extinction. This randomly found image turned out to be so powerful that the entire installation was built around it. It became a journey through time that the viewer makes in order to see this dawn in the finale and believe that even after complete devastation, life will find a way to return.
How to make time flow?
To realize this idea, it was necessary to find a balance between the concept and the technical implementation. The installation is based on a computer with TouchDesigner, which controls video playback, and a custom controller based on ESP32 with an infrared sensor. I chose the IR sensor for its accuracy and invisibility — a small black sensor mounted directly under the screen does not distract the viewer from immersion.
The main challenge was to create the video sequence itself. How to show the smooth flow of millions of years? A simple crossfade between six key eras—from blooming forests to volcanic wastelands to a new world—would look cheap and destroy magic. I needed the landscape not just to change, but to "live" and transform in front of the viewer's eyes.
The solution was found in ComfyUI, where I built my own pipeline for neural network image processing. I "fed" him six epoch keyframes and forced the neural network not just to mix them, but to creatively redraw each of the 20 intermediate frames between them. This required fine-tuning. Too much freedom — and the mountains will "float", the picture will become jerky. Too little, and we'll get that "overlooked" transition. As a result, we managed to find a balance in which the general features of the landscape are preserved, and the details — vegetation, atmosphere — are constantly changing, creating the same effect of rewinding time. This pipeline became an author's development, which I later used in other projects.
Off-screen
When a work gets into the gallery, it begins to live its own life, and feedback does not always come in the form of words. For me, the impact of "Dawn of a New Era" manifested itself in two key points that proved to be more eloquent than any reviews.
The first is a serious interest in buying the entire installation. It was a sign that the work took place not just as a technical sketch, but as a holistic artistic statement that someone wanted to make a part of their life. This fact itself proved to me that my work resonated and was valuable.
And I got the second one from myself. The image of "dawn", which gave rise to the whole project, did not let me go so easily =). I felt like he deserved more than just being a part of a digital video. That was the first time I decided to transfer my work to the material world. It was almost a ritual gesture: to take the ephemeral pixels born of the code and fix them on the canvas, creating a unique, unique artifact. This canvas, signed and framed, became for me the physical embodiment of the entire project — both a point in one story and the beginning of a new one.
Results
"The Dawn of a New Era" has become something more for me than just a work for an exhibition. This project was a significant milestone in my practice, because it was here that the technology was born that allowed me to tell stories in a new way. The pipeline developed at ComfyUI has become the tool without which it would have been impossible to create not only this, but also subsequent works. For example, "The Abandoned Garden".
But the main thing is the experience of creating a project that offers the viewer not just to contemplate, but to participate. To literally touch the idea that history is cyclical and life is incredibly stubborn. If we can so easily look into the past and see the fragility of bygone eras, are we able to recognize and protect our new dawn?
