Last Whispers — AMANDA TASSE

Poetic Science

Artist Lena Herzog commissioned me to develop a series of animations for Last Whispers, an immersive oratorio with music composed by Academy Award winning sound designers. It expanded into a 55 minute video and multi-format immersive experiences (VR, dome projection, spherical 8K museum installation, and large scale exterior wall mural projection). The challenge was to breathe context-appropriate visuals into what originated as a purely audio piece. My role evolved beyond map-maker to Art Director/Designer/Animator (25 minutes of custom animated content for the 55 minute video and 30 minutes for the VR/Immersive pieces). The most recent immersive work premiered (April 2022) and is currently open at the Venice Biennale through September 2022 in 3 formats: immersive VR (headset - Ca’ Foscari Zattere/Cultural Flow Zone), mural installation (Main courtyard of Ca’Foscari
Palazzo Ca’Giustinian), and exterior nighttime projection (Main Courtyard Ca’Foscari
Palazzo Ca’Giustinian)

Venice Biennale Mural at the Main courtyard of Ca’Foscari with imagery from the immersive work (create in Unreal Game Engine) - April 2022

Venice Biennale VR Headset Gallery Image

Space Language Chorus

UCSB Allosphere research facility is collaborating with the Last Whispers team to screen an 8K spherical projection with extreme surround sound.

Cat's Eye Nebula

To best evoke a celebration of language and culture alongside its haunting loss, I designed the maps as living entities that evolve from 2D simplicity to 3D complexity before churning into chaos and dissolving. We used metaphors from space, such as the birth and death of stars, to communicate the life-cycle of language and culture, and to shift between the intimacy of a single whisper to a global species perspective.

Water Cloud Texture

In my creative non-fiction work, I strive for a balance between information, feeling, and story. My guiding design philosophy was to build the visuals on a foundation of accurate real-world data, and then to playfully layer in more sensory and poetic details to communicate the feeling and concepts of the piece.

Globe Dissolution

This project inspired a deep dive into map-making practices and methods. I pieced together U.S. government land satellite imagery to create super high-resolution (16K) photographic maps, used open source mapping software to extract images of all the major roads across the world as the base map for a web-like outline textures, integrated NASA mapping imagery, and created custom terrain textures from painted water sea foam, waves, moss, particles, stars, and clouds.

Hokkaido Landsat Cropped

Working at super high resolution allowed us to shift perspectives from extreme close-ups to wide shots and to repurpose many of the assets when recreating part of the project as a VR experience in Unreal. We collaborated with Emblematic Group to create the prototype demo and are in the process of building out a longer experience.

Water White-Out