A New Kind of Interactive Exhibit
Los Angeles based artist Maggie West will premiere her first ever interactive exhibition, Echoes, in the Now Trending room at Outernet London. The installation transforms the space into a living digital garden where flowers bloom, grow, and respond in real time to the movement of visitors using motion tracking technology.
Echoes is the first exhibition of its kind created entirely from real time lapse photography, without the use of AI or 3D rendering. Built from thousands of photographs of real plants and flowers, the work allows audiences to playfully interact with the installation while also experiencing the authentic textures, forms, and natural bloom patterns found in nature itself.
The example videos included below were filmed as early proof of concept demonstrations to test the interactive technology and movement response system. The final exhibition will feature fully refined visuals, expanded environments, and immersive color palettes developed through the design directions and the three visual schemes outlined throughout this deck.
Crimson Bloom
The first environment in Echoes is built from African daisies, sowthistle, jade plants, and other botanical elements West encountered growing throughout her Los Angeles neighborhood. By combining locally observed plant life with large scale projection and motion responsive animation, the scene transforms familiar flora into a surreal digital landscape.
While the installation is washed in striking red light to create a dreamlike atmosphere, subtle areas of white light are woven throughout the piece, allowing the natural colors and textures of the daisies to emerge. This interplay between intense color and moments of realism reflects the larger concept behind Echoes: reimagining real plant life through immersive technology while still preserving the authentic beauty and structure of the natural world.
As visitors move through the first scene, the daisies slowly open and close in response to their presence, echoing the rhythm and direction of nearby movement. The interaction creates the feeling that the environment itself is alive and aware, transforming the flowers from static imagery into a responsive digital ecosystem. By using real time lapse photography rather than simulated plants, the movement retains the organic irregularities and subtle behavior patterns found in nature.
Golden Canopy
The second scene in Echoes is constructed from golden bamboo, money leaves, plumeria, and Asiatic lilies, combining tropical foliage with luminous floral elements to create a warm and immersive digital environment. Dense layers of bamboo form a flowing canopy across the screens while bursts of lilies and plumeria emerge throughout the composition, creating moments of softness and color within the larger landscape.
Unlike the intense red palette of the daisy scene, this scene leans into rich golden tones, evoking the feeling of sunlight filtering through dense plant life. As visitors move through the space, the environment responds with subtle shifts in bloom patterns and movement, creating the sensation of walking through a living garden suspended between the natural and the surreal.
This scene also highlights the dramatically different ways plant species grow and bloom. Through time lapse photography, visitors are able to observe subtle natural behaviors that are often impossible to notice in real time. Plumeria flowers unfurl in slow spiraling motions, with petals twisting outward in smooth circular formations, while jade blossoms burst open sharply like stars, expanding outward in sudden geometric shapes. By placing these contrasting bloom patterns side by side within an interactive environment, the installation becomes both visually immersive and quietly educational, revealing the hidden choreography of real plant life.
Violet Veil
The final scene in Echoes features dramatic passionflower vines winding throughout the space, transforming the room into a dense and immersive tangle of curling botanical forms. Illuminated in deep violet tones, the scene emphasizes the fluid movement and sculptural qualities of the vines as they stretch, twist, and drift across the screens.
The passionflower vines introduce an entirely different texture language from the previous environments. In contrast to the sharp spikes of sowthistle or the clean linear structure of bamboo, the vines move in soft organic curves, looping and spiraling through the composition in a more fluid and unpredictable way. This shifting visual rhythm gives this scene a more dreamlike and atmospheric quality.
Unlike many of the other plants featured throughout Echoes, passionflowers grow naturally in both Los Angeles and London, creating a botanical connection between the two cities. Their surreal and highly intricate structures may already feel familiar to many visitors, yet the monumental scale of the installation reveals details that often go unnoticed in everyday life. Enlarged across the surrounding screens, the flowers’ layered filaments, twisting tendrils, and complex radial forms become almost otherworldly.
In nature, a passionflower bloom is fleeting, often opening for only a single day before curling inward and closing forever. Within this scene, however, the flowers exist in a continuous cycle of blooming, movement, and rebirth. The installation transforms these temporary natural moments into an endless living landscape where the flowers repeatedly awaken and respond to the movement of the audience around them.
A Digital Garden For the Public
Echoes represents a major evolution in West’s practice, expanding her work beyond immersive moving image environments into fully interactive digital ecosystems. By allowing visitors to directly influence the blooming and movement of real photographic plant life, the exhibition creates a new relationship between audience, technology, and nature. The project pushes West’s long standing exploration of light, color, and botanical photography into an entirely new territory, where viewers are no longer passive observers but active participants within the landscape itself.
As one of the world’s leading destinations for large scale digital art and interactive technology, Outernet London is the ideal location to premiere a project of this scale and ambition. The exhibition reflects the growing importance of public digital art experiences that are both technologically innovative and widely accessible. By presenting Echoes as a free public installation, the work invites audiences of all ages and backgrounds to engage with contemporary art in an open and approachable way, transforming a shared public space into a living environment of curiosity, movement, and wonder.
Thanks for reading!
Maggie@maggiewest.co