Rutopia is a virtual reality art project developed for the CAVE, GeoWall, passive and active stereo projection environments. It describes an ideal garden, a fairy park, which shows a unity of technology, man, and nature. Its visual style is based on poetics and symbology from Russian fairy tales and folk art. In Rutopia, trees communicate with the visitor of the park, and the growth of the trees is dependent upon the user’s proximity. The trees are symbols of interaction, intelligent transmitters that form the environment, flip time, transform perspectives, and conduct a “tour” of the garden.

Participants can rotate the garden about themselves to watch and hear the trees growing from the different angles and perspectives. The evolution of tree growth is controlled by the participant; one can explore the patterns of growth moving through time - backwards and forwards.

Rutopia is also a component to Animagina :: (life+imagination) - an experimental collaborative VR project which plays with techno-topian / technopocalypse symbols in a conceptual landscape.

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