The World's First Holo Zoo
Caco Peguero joins the team at CultureHub NYC over zoom to reflect upon his residency at CultureHub LA, where he created his installation, Futuring: A Zoo for Extinct Animals, a first-of-its-kind interactive Holo Zoo which held three extinct animals: The Japanese Sea Lion, the California Grizzly Bear, and the Western Black Rhino.
Tell us about your project, and how you utilized the CultureHub Residency.
My project was the Holo Zoo. It was an augmented reality zoo for extinct animals, and it consisted of 3 parts. The first part was the AI animals, the second part was the projection within the space at CultureHub LA, and then the third part was user engagement, how to take the user input from the physical space, so users would be able to go to my website, and give the animals either positive vibes or food within the augmented reality zoo. You can imagine it as kind of a globally owned Tamagotchis. The third component of this project was really where I began to utilize the CultureHub Residency, as I had very limited experience working with server hosting or troubleshooting with Javascript and HTML.
I learned so much, and I'm super thankful that Camille was patient enough to talk to me about all these really technical things, and I was probably asking all these baby questions where I didn't know anything, so yeah the knowledge that I gained in that week around servers and she also helped me do all the projection mapping to set up for the space.
Can you speak on your inspirations for creating this project?
I accidentally started collecting articles on things like global disasters that I've been reading on the news, be it about instances related to weather, catastrophe, or animal extinction. I came across this article on the BBC about a bunch of Saiga just dying in a matter of days, which really stood out to me, making me wonder why this was happening and prompting me to look at the amount of data that's coming out around mass extinction happening due to climate change. I thought it was an important conversation, but also a tough one. No one wants to sit and talk about all the stuff that humans are doing to ruin this planet, as that's not very fun. So I wanted to create something engaging to start a conversation about this topic.
I find that we are often just talking around it, and people arrive at those conclusions independently of you. Just talking with people and then starting a conversation around topics such as the California Grizzly bear being extinct when it's on the California flags, and finding that a lot of people didn't realize that the California grizzly bear was extinct. So just being able to engage with the public around those topics in a way that didn't seem too preachy was kind of my goal.
How would you describe the engagement you received from the audience through the exhibition and with their phones?
I got a lot of really positive feedback, both that people enjoyed the experience, but also that they thought it was gonna be something different. The cool thing about putting something out in the world that's physical, in terms of a space, is that you can have an idea for how you expect people to engage with what you put out there, but people are going to engage with it in the way that they see fit.
I was really surprised to see people just post up and sit in front of the projections of the animals for like 20 min at a time. The virtual aspect was more difficult to have the audience interact with, particularly the QR codes that were placed in the installation so the public could interact with the animals online through their phones. I think next time I try something like this out I would opt for something more like having I-pads up so people could take turns interacting with the animals.
I also just had very positive feedback from the audience that they just loved the space I created, saying things like: “I wish this was my bedroom, it’s so chill,” or “I want to hang out here all the time,” and that's what ended up happening! I think it was a combination of just watching an animal, you know like those Apple screen savers where you just watch jellyfish swim around. And it's like, oh, wow, this is beautiful! It had that vibe where people would just like sit around and watch the animals just walk around and swim and do their thing which was a nice opportunity to come and like sit next to them, and just chat about what they thought of the project so it was kinda like a zen space on accident, but I was into it.
Tell us about a current artistic inspiration or obsession of yours
In terms of projects right now I’m fascinated by naturalists, who were also able to draw or watercolor the things they observed, like the drawings by Ernst Heinrich Haeckel who researched various flora and fauna and depicted his discoveries through drawings. There was also this father-son duo, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who created these glass flowers so Botanists could study plants during the winter when plants would die. I like this idea of trying to represent something natural in this way, that's super artificial. But still holds true to its original form. It's best to hold true to what that thing is, which is why I was into the idea of making AI animals.
Do you have any plans for what's next with you artistically, or maybe regarding this project?
Yeah, I wanna keep building upon this project in terms of the types of engagements that you can have with the animals, making it something where you can also maybe not have to be in a physical space to engage with it, maybe turn it into a game that you can download on steam and then just get on a server with a bunch of other people and engage with these extinct animals. So, I hope to hope to do that and then also continue to add more animals, hopefully not too many as we’d like to keep animals like the polar bears in on this side of reality!
