An immersive work that renders a Los Angeles foothill the way a black bear senses it: shared ground, shrinking as the climate warms.

Giving Ground is a two-part immersive work built from one captured world. A shared, room-scale projection installation puts a group inside the bear's perceptual world, organized by sound and visualized smell rather than sight, where the room's collective behavior decides whether a mother bear and her cubs can move through it safely. A companion cinematic piece for VR headset and dome carries the wider story, from bear BB-12, killed crossing the 101 in 2023, to BB-14, who survived the 2025 Palisades fires and ranges widely with her cubs, and the question their lives raise: as fire and drought shrink the ground we share, how much are we willing to give back?

This page collects research and development materials, captured terrain, sensory and sound studies, visual references, and prototypes from the related NEIGHBOR project that grounds this work. It will be updated as the work develops

Prior Immersive Experience

Also included are examples of my prior immersive work as art director and lead artist on Lena Herzog's Trinity Trilogy, a series of poetic immersive works on extinction shown at the Venice Biennale, SXSW, and Sundance. This work grounds the technical and creative approach behind Giving Ground and shares several of its collaborators.

DIRECTOR: LENA HERZOG | ART DIRECTOR, ARTIST: AMANDA TASSE | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: JONATHAN YOMAYUZA | COMPOSER: MARCO CAPALBO, MARK MANGINI

The Reversal is the 3rd part of the Trilogy (Last Whispers, Any War Any Enemy) about extinction. Here, linear time reverses and space folds into itself; the forces of destruction that eclipsed humanity reverse and invert upon themselves, revealing a world of post-human holographic memory focused on moments of beauty, joy, connection, and reverence. The space itself morphs from traditional linear perspective to reverse perspective to help convey this sense of spatial-temporal unfolding - a unique and intriguing 3D worldbuilding design and art direction challenge. We are also experimenting with combining hand-made animation with AI generated video for some memories to visualize the enmeshment of AI and human-made in digital memory.  

The Reversal is in production. Below is a selection of early concept sketches and art direction references.

DIRECTOR: LENA HERZOG | ART DIRECTOR, ARTIST: AMANDA TASSE | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: JONATHAN YOMAYUZA | COMPOSER: MARCO CAPALBO

The goal was to create a space for contemplating senseless mass destruction from nuclear war. It bridges immersive real-time (photogrammetry, stylized 3D art) with traditional analog methods (illustrative etching, painting, sculpture) to evoke a continuum of humanity imagining our eventual demise. We wanted to visualize emotional states of realization and loss with tactile texture.

Technical director Yomayuza and I assisted Herzog with strategizing the translation from traditional art into 3D spatiality and story, researching and developing novel methods for real-time 3D. Herzog inventively re-translated the stylized photogrammetry back into 15th century Italian etchings, which premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale. I created iterative concept art and assets (illustration, stylization paint-overs, storyboards, textures, shaders, character models, rigs, animation, motion titles). My traditional and digital fine art experience helped me translate amongst team members for especially challenging stylized assets.

DIRECTOR: LENA HERZOG | ART DIRECTOR, ARTIST: AMANDA TASSE | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: JONATHAN YOMAYUZA | COMPOSERS: MARK MANGINI, MARCO CAPALBO

The goal was to help the viewer “feel” the massive scale of rapid language extinction, and to celebrate last whispers from dying languages. I was initially hired to create a series of maps to show locations of featured languages. My role evolved into the design and animation of an evocative extended media world.

We intended to create a visual space that amplified the sound design of remixed archival voices from dying or extinct languages, created by Mark Mangini (academy award winning sound design for “Dune”, “Mad Max Fury Road”) and Marco Capalbo (avant-garde composer). I helped Herzog ground and visualize the world, and created many of the art assets (concept sketches, digital paintings, textures, models, animation, motion design). I also adapted them from our initial 2D/3D 55 minute video (Cinema 4D, After Effects, Drone Photography) to full 3D (Cinema 4D, Unreal RT3D) for VR, dome, and gallery projection.

My initial world-building design integrated real-world data (Global Informational Systems, satellite weather imagery, language scripts) with expressive methods (digital painting, illustration, modeling, etc.). I demonstrated some of this process as an artist for Intel’s booth at the Adobe Max conference. Screenshots of the images have been featured heavily as printed photographs alongside the projects’ screenings and in press.